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THE LIGHT : IS IT WANING ? 



THE FLETCHER PRIZE. 



The will of the late Hon. Eichaed Fletchek, LL.D., of 
Boston, placed in the hands of the Trustees of Dartmouth 
College a special fund, from the proceeds of which they are to 
offer biennially a prize of Five Hundred Dollaks for the 
best essay on the subject indicated in the following extract 
from the will : — 

" In view of the numerous and powerful influences constantly 
active in drawing professed Christians into fatal conformity 
with the world, both in spirit and practice ; in view also of the 
lamentable and amazing fact that Christianity exerts so little 
practical influence, even on countries nominally Christian, — 
it has seemed to me that some good might be done by mak- 
ing permanent provision for obtaining and publishing, once in 
two years, a prize essay setting forth truths and reasoning cal- 
culated to counteract such worldly influences, and impressing 
on the minds of all Christians a solemn sense of their duty to 
exhibit in their godly lives and conversation the beneficent 
effects of the religion they profess, and thus increase the 
efficiency of Christianity in Christian countries, and recom- 
mend its acceptance to the heathen nations of the world." 

In accordance with the said will, the trustees, in Decem- 
ber, 1876, offered the above-named prize the third time, and 
appointed the following Committee of Award: Rev. E. B. 
Webb, D.D., Rev. A. J. Gordon, D.D., and Rev. J. E. Cookman, 
D.D., all of Boston. The Rev. Dr. Webb being unable to 
serve, on account of ill-health, the Rev. John O. Means, D.D., 
of Boston Highlands, was appointed i^ his place. The com- 
mittee, by unanimous vote, awarded the prize to the essay in 
this volume. g ^ BARTLETT, President. 

Dabtmouth College, Hanover, N.H. 
Nov. 1, 1878. 



1879. 



THE LIGHT: 

IS IT WANING? 

Why? How much? and Wha^tshall we do? 



BOSTON : 
CONGREGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY, 

CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE, 
BEACON STREET. 

1879. 

~ — '^ 



-y,-^^^' 

:%^^ 



Copyright, 1878, bt - 
CONGREaATIONAL PUBLISHINa SOCIETY. 



STEREOTYPED BY 
C. J. PETERS & SON, 

73 Federal Steeet. 



PEEFAOE. 



The author of this little treatise is deepty impressed 
with the belief that "Yea" is a more fruitful word 
than "Nay." It is not what we deny that makes 
us strong, but what we believe. Similarly, he thinks, 
dissuasive appeals can at the utmost be but half-way 
effective. As John Newton long ago said, " We can- 
not shovel out darkness: we must shine it out." 

His plan, in the preparation of the essay, has been 
to forestall timid objections to the exposure he felt 
constrained to make, by showing, in the first place, 
how victorious Christianity really has been, and how 
it comes to pass that her victories stand out now in 
less bold relief than in former times. 

Having thus cleared the way for plain speech, he 
has ventured to lay bare some of the evils and some 
of the dangers that now beset the Church. K many 
differ widely with him as to the point to which notice 
should be especially drawn, he wiU not be at all sur- 
prised. But what he offers is his sincere, well-weighed 
belief, long entertained. 



b PEEFACE. 

And the remedy he proposes is simply a living sense 
of the great central truth, — Christ Jesus' the Lord ; 
not only Redeemer, but King ; to be not merely 
trusted, but loyally served. That (he thinks), and 
that only^ unties the knot. 



OOl^TENTS. 



PART I. 

CHAPTER L PAGB 

Introductory. — Light and Light-Holders. — Failure 

OF the Church predicted, and to be considered . 13 

CHAPTER H. 

First View. — Are Things as they seem? — Effect of 
permanent Successes. — Examples .... 18 

CHAPTER ni. 

Another Look. — Changes in Infidelity and Supersti- 
tion. — Note on Scientific Infidelity .... 25 

CHAPTER IV. 

Last Word on this Point. — Our Principlb illustrat- 
ed BY Foreign Missions . . . . . . .37 

CHAPTER V. 

Second View. — Present Evils adahtted and in part 
EXPLAINED. — This a Shallow Age .... 45 



PART II. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Conditions of Real Peril to the Light. — Low State 
OF Christian Intelligence. — Reduced Power of 
Standard Truths. — Moral Judgment becoming un- 
settled. — Decline of Reverence 55 

7 



8 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER YII. 

Subject contintjed. — Decay of Authority ln" the 

Churches, and consequently of Discipline . . 65 

CHAPTER yni. 

Natural Operation of Certain Moral Causes. — Natu- 
ral History of Christian Emotion. — Sentiment. — 
Cant . •. . 72 

CHAPTER IX. 

Subject continued. — Natural History of Christian 
Labor. — Shallowing. — Routine. — Our Saviour's 
Use of the Word ** Hypocrite'' 83 

CHAPTER X. 

Subject continued. — Scepticism leaking in. — Effect 
of Difficulties on a Robust Soul; on the Weaker, 90 

CHAPTER XI. 

Abuses and Disorders. — Divorce, in many Minds, of 
Morals And Religion.— Secularizing of Churches 
AND Worship.— Hymns that profess too much . 96 



PART III. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Where shall we seek a Remedy? — In Praying and 
Working for an Age of Strong Conviction, Intel- 
lectual AND Moral 105 

CHAPTER XHI. 

Subject-Matter of this Conviction: A Redeemer ad- 
ministering A Law Ill 



CONTENTS. 9 

CHAPTER XIY. 

How WTLIi THIS COITVICTION COMPORT ITSELF IN THE IN- 
DIVIDUAL ? — Assert itself as Central; Reduce the 
Area and destroy the Power of Doubt; Make it- 
self A Standard of Value; Becoinie the Guide of 
Life; Enrich the Emotions; Strengthen the whole 
Man. 116 

CHAPTER XV. 

How will the Conviction comport itself in a Nation ? 
— Infidelity WOULD be seen small and futile; The 
old Battle-Cry ring out in Love; Brotherly Love 
WOULD grow; Learning and Science be sanctified; 
Man's Treasures be the Lord's; The Bible be glo- 
rified 124 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Is this Conclusion practical ? 130 

CHAPTER XVH. 
Summing up , , 137 

CHAPTER XVm. 
"What then? Consecration 143 



PART I. 



THE LIGHT : IS IT WANING ? 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTOEY. — LIGHT AND LIGHT-HOLDEES. 

MINDS beyond all counting have, without 
doubt, endeavored at some time to picture 
to themselves the glory of that supreme moment 
when God said, " Let light be ! " and the light was. 
The earth, that had been only a dark blot in the 
heavens, began then to be a world (may we not so 
imagine it?), the centre of a soft, clouded radiance, 
where pulses of auroral splendor beat silently. But 
the fiat of the fourth creative day gathered up that 
vague lustre which had been till then diffused and 
seatless. " Let there be light-holders ! " " And 
it was so. And God made two great lights. . . . 
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, 
to give light to the earths For all the great ob- 
jects of light, this centring of it upon the heaven- 
ly bodies seems to have been indispensable. 

Similarly we may well admit that there has 

13 



14 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

always been a religious sense — there have always 
been religious affections — outside of that con- 
stellation which we call the visible church ; even 
that they antedated that church. Missionaries 
reaching islands in the South Pacific, where no 
Christian word had ever been spoken, have found 
men touched with a genuine sense of sin, and 
yearning for peace with an unknown God. Much 
more is this likely to have been true when, so to 
speak, the footprints of the Creator were fresh 
upon the earth. 

But it is certain that here, also, God appointed 
the light-holder as necessary to the effectiveness 
of the light. He brought the Church into being, 
to concentrate, to order, and to radiate afar, the 
light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of 
Jesus Christ. 

And — after making all sad confessions, how 
this light has been hidden, often and grossly 
hidden, by the very bodies that ought to have dis- 
pensed it — all must acknowledge, whatever they 
may accuse us of now, that there has been no 
other light-holder through all the ages that could 
bear a moment's comparison with the Church of 
Christ. Wherever the name or being of the true 
God is known ; wherever a sound morality has 
taken any hold upon the public conscience ; wher- 
ever true homes are found, and woman is Jionored, 
and charity diffused ; wherever science flourishes, 
or comfort spreads, or gentle virtues are esteemed, 



LIGHT AND LIGHT-HOLDERS. 15 

or freedom lives, — there, in some age, has the 
Church alighted and held sway. Even Mr. Lecky, 
who grudges any word of praise to the Christianity 
whose debtor he is for every thing that makes life, 
I will not say worth having, but fit to be en- 
dured, — even Mr. Lecky acknowledges that the 
Church must have the glory of bringing " the 
feminine virtues " ^ to their place in the front rank 
of honor ; that to her woman owes every step of 
the mighty traverse she has made from abject 
slavery to her present exalted place ; and that 
she — this visible and often earthly Church of 
Christ — alone put down the gladiatorial games, 
and made murder the crime it now is. 

There are very few, I repeat it, to deny these 
things as to the past. But now many rise up to 
say that her term of power and blessing is near 
its end. Some say tliis triumphantly, the more 
shame to them ! Others confess it with bitter dis- 
appointment and sorrow. They can see no vic- 
tories, no power, no procreant life, in the present 
age, to match the glories and blessings of the past. 
They forget — it seems that they must have for- 
gotten — how much distance has to do with the 
radiance of the heavenly bodies ; so that if we 
were brought near the surface of the moon, for 
example, we should no longer see her " walking 
in brightness," but jagged and dead rock, seamed 

1 Clemency, charity, forgiveness, patience, cliastity, and such 
like. 



16 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

and burned and dark. Consider the stars : at our 
awful distance the heavens are inlaid with them, 
they seem to light one another. But we know 
that their distances are inconceivable, and be- 
tween them lie the infinite cold, silent spaces. Yet 
they are^ and they shine. The mental impression 
in this second case is even more fallacious than 
in the first. 

So, looking back through the ages, great men 
and great events seem to crowd upon one another. 
It is simply the historical perspective. Stars of 
any sort seldom touch. 

It is a fair question, however, whether these 
convictions or imaginations are just or not, — fair, 
but far more important than fair: so important, 
that I refrain from even suggesting the terrible 
things which will logically — and actually — fol- 
low if they prove true ; because the question should 
be considered judicially. Let us know the truth, 
at whatever cost. 

The allegation may be partly true, and yet 
greatly false. The truth in it may be transient, 
and the falsehood permanent, or vice versa. Let 
us know. , 

I. We can discover some conditions in which 
the light would seem to be waning when it was 
not. 

II. We can discover some conditions under 
which the light might wane greatly, with no real 
danger of extinction. 



LIGHT AND LIGHT-HOLDEES. 17 

III. We can discover some conditions that 
would involve signal peril to the light. 

How far these suppositions apply to the facts in 
the case, is the subject of the present study. 



18 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 



CHAPTER 11. 

FIEST VIEW. — AEE THINGS AS THEY SEEM? 

IT is a very obvious remark, that, in the prog 
ress of a great change, the subordinate 
changes involved must become less and less strik- 
ing as the work advances, — obvious, but equally 
necessary if we would avoid ridiculous mistakes. 
In ploughing a field, the drawing of the first fur- 
row affects the landscape more than many subse- 
quent ones can. 

When a light-house puts on its " crown of 
glory" at night, the first forth-streaming of its 
ray is an incomparable change. No flashes and 
no glow at any later moment can make so great 
a difference to the eye. 

The opening and the advancing spring admit 
the same comparison. To-day the world is gray 
and bare : the seal of its long death is on its face. 
To-night warm rains descend: the iron bonds 
of winter are dissolved. When, after a few days, 
the clouds lift and break, and give way to the 
pursuing sun, God has " renewed the face of the 
earth." A subtle verdure tints the soil, one can 



ARE THINGS AS THEY SEEM? 19 

hardly say how or where ; the colors of the trees 
have changed ; a spray of bloom appears on this 
and the other leafless stem. In the very place of 
death is life. 

Each following day does indeed bring its won- 
ders; but none are so wonderful as this first, 
because they are all advances in the same line. It 
is only more or less of verdure and bloom, — more 
or less of music, instead of silence. 

Now, must not this be true also of Christianity ? 
Take the case of any people : take the case of our 
own ancestors, whose mythology was Druidic or 
Scandinavian. Their banners have been set up for 
ages in the name of Thor or Woden. Bloody sac- 
rifices, superstitious fears, orgies of brutal worship, 
apotheosis of human passions, — the long story can 
be very briefly summed. This wild paganism, 
whichever it was, held the nation out of civiliza- 
tion and culture, beyond a certain very low level. 
It was the winter of a race. 

Surely the entrance of God's word was light in 
darkness. The utmost that can follow it is — 
more light ; not something new, but simply more 
of what we have. No subsequent change can 
match the first. When the heathen temples were 
pulled down, and the idols tlirust into the fire or 
hurled into the sea, and war was no more a god, 
and the sabbath dawned, and hymns began to be 
sung, and woman was free, and marriage became a 
law, and souls were new-born, the revolution was 



20 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

wrought. The old world was delivered of the 
new. 

But, indeed, we do not need so strong an in- 
stance. Let us go out into any frontier region, 
where we can anticipate the church and the home 
missionary, see him arrive, and compare the things 
that are at their last with the things that succeed 
them. 

It is the evening of the last day of the week ; 
and, as we look about us, we see no token that 
that fact is remembered, or even known, unless we 
so interpret the larger crowd of loungers about the 
streets, the fruitful busy-ness of the saloons and 
bar-rooms, the stolid mirth, the ready quarrel, the 
superabounding profanity, the shameful drunken- 
ness. 

The sabbath dawns, and brightens into full day. 
You see that it is the sabbath, in that a part of the 
stores are closed; the shutters of most dwelling- 
houses open later, being an idle day, there is no 
haste about rising ; children, here and there, grad- 
ually appear in clean clothes ; little knots of gos- 
sips collect about the gates, or lean over their 
fences. Men go off hunting or fishing. Later in 
the day riding-parties are formed, and the last 
precious hours of God's day are successfully got 
rid ofi 

But the missionary begins his work : long days 
of visiting, investigating, negotiation, ensue. A 
little movement is finally seen at points in the god- 



ARE THINGS AS THEY SEEM? 21 

less mass, — as in a fog, when the sun has shone 
upon it for an hour. Some hearts, in which old 
memories are tender if not strong, begin to wel- 
come the suggestion of " service " to be held. A 
room is found, and rudely prepared for this new 
purpose. A few of the bravest, and a few of the 
newer comers, dare to be present on the sabbath 
morning, and to carry home Bibles or books or 
tracts, and read them there, instead of visiting or 
worse. 

And the Lord is with his servant. Some back- 
sliders are awakened, some old soldier of Satan is 
struck down and taken captive, some tender 
youth is drawn to the Saviour's feet. The meet- 
ings grow in numbers and result; the scornful 
opposition of the world, that hates this disturbing 
gospel, spends its force, and dies down sullenly; a 
Christian Society is formed, and begins its 
career of blessing. In a word, the new world is 
created, — " the new heavens and the new earth." 

This^ clearly, is the radical change. The village 
we are looking at may grow into a city. The 
little, humble upper room may give place to mas- 
sive temples. The " two or three gathered in His 
name " may become a multitude. But, in the na- 
ture of things, there can be no other event like 
that first event. And when once religion has con- 
quered standing-ground for itself, and introduced 
its divinely-ordered systems, it can hardly ever 
again produce such a sensation as that with which 
it began. 



22 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

Except on one supposition, — that there, come 
first a great falling-away, a declension that shall 
nearly destroy the life and good name of the 
Church. At the cost only of terrible sin, can she 
make a second chapter like the first. 

It is not intended, of course, to maintain that 
the life of a church will be an absolute dead level, 
- — utterly uneventful. Life involves more or less 
of fluctuation and paroxysm by a law of nature. 
Growth, decline, divisions, colonies, revivals, re- 
buildings, removals, accessions, losses, — all these 
things will come. A church is rather like a " re- 
volving light, varied by flashes," than the unwan- 
ing sun. 

The application of the truth I have thus en- 
deavored to illustrate is obvious enough. If the 
changes of the present period in the religious 
history of Christendom are less striking than of 
yore, it does not necessarily follow that they argue 
real declension or loss of power; because stages 
which include only progress can never be so tell- 
ing as that stage wliich contained the heginning. 

There never will be any period of American 
history of such intense interest as that which 
reaches from the first settlements to the close of 
the Revolutionary war, — the birth-period of the 
nation, — just because it was the period of birth. 
Only the life-and-death struggle of the civil war 
can approach it in impressiveness. The many 
silent and fruitful years that rolled between — the 



AEE THINGS AS THEY SEEM? 23 

Niles of time — make almost no record in the 
comparison ; and yet in mere material production 
almost any one since the Revolution has surpassed 
almost any one before that date. 

Just thus has it been with the modern Church. 
If we count one hundred and thirty years from 
Luther to the Peace of Westphalia, we mark out 
the birth-century of Protestant Europe. North- 
western Europe can never know such another age, 
except she purchase it first by wholesale apostasy. 
The power of Rome over her torn down; the 
true faith revived, and the ordinance of preaching 
restored to its rank ; the substruction of Calvinis- 
tic theology let in under the Protestant Church, — 
the indispensable, solid pillar of its stability ; the 
up-burst of emancipated mind ; the mere addition 
of new words, and new classes of words, to human 
speech, — these things, and such as these, make it 
an age unique, since the Christian era itself, for all 
that great population, and for the multitudes in 
other lands that have sprung from their loins. • 

But is this an acknowledgment that Protestant 
Europe has stood still, or gone back, since 1648? 
Let Foreign Missions answer, and Bftle and 
tract societies, and the thousand-fold forms of 
pious benevolence. In every Protestant country, 
without' exception, the tide of Christian life and 
power has risen higher and higher, and dug chan- 
nels for itself, and fertilized mjrriads of once bar- 
ren fields, and overflowed the life of the land, and 



24 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

poured its sweetness npon the sea, and bathed the 
islands and the thirsty continents with blessing. 

And, if we look long enough and candidly 
enough upon these things to allow them to loom 
up in their proper magnitude, we shall see that 
the reason why men honestly doubt whether reli- 
gion is now making progress is, that its own ac- 
complished work lessens its apparent effectiveness. 



ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 25 



CHAPTER III. 

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAIVIE MATTER. 

I FREELY admit that Christianity is just as 
much open to contemporary as to historical 
comparison. It is just as right to test her prog- 
ress by landmarks on the bank of the river of 
time, as by her present distance from her starting- 
point. 

The plea is often made, that there is far less con- 
trariety between the beliefs, tempers, practices, and 
principles of the Church and the world now than 
there once was, and that this proves the degeneracy 
of the Church. We may find a serious amount of 
truth in this plea hereafter. Just at this point I 
desire to show that the conclusion may not be so 
certain nor so direct as some people suppose. 
What if a steamer does not succeed in leaving a 
flat-boat ivliich is made fast to her ? must we infer 
that she makes no headway at all ? 

If Christianity has largely transformed mankind, 
in social, moral, intellectual, national life ; i.e., if 
the word " Christendom " is any thing more than 
an uncouth and hollow sound, — then Christianity 



26 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAITING? 

i 

cannot look as bright on the new background as 
the old. Her very success has mjured the relief. 

It will not be necessary — though notwithout 
its interest and instruction too — to dwell here 
upon the improved conduct of nations to each 
other, and that in the very direction the gospel 
would ordain, — the ameliorations of war since 
the days of " fire and sword " and of the killing 
or enslaving of prisoners, the almost infinitely 
milder spirit of criminal law, the purer and finer 
social relation of the sexes, the higher public 
opinion on moral questions. On these, and many 
similar and significant alterations wrought by the 
gospel and the Church (through God's grace), 
much might truly and appropriately be said. But 
it will suffice for my present purpose to call atten- 
tion to the work Christianity has done upon her 
two great adversaries, infidelity and superstition. 

Looking back to the days of Bolingbroke and 
Hume, of Voltaire and Paine, nothing strikes one 
more than the utter negations in which they dealt. 
Their efforts were purely destructive. ^^ Ecrasez 
Vinfame!'''' ''Crush the wretch!" is the shrill 
blasphemy of Voltaire. And if one had asked, 
" To erect what ? " he would have found no answer 
except certain vapidities about liberty. And the 
Englishman would have been found as barren of 
constructive suggestion as the Frenchman. 

Indeed, I doubt if any part of the reply upon 
the Christian side was more impressive, was as 



ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 27 

impressive, to prudent and thoughtful minds, as the 
challenge based on this fact-: " Before you pull 
down our religion, show us what we are to have in 
place of it. Are you building a temple to some 
God we can worship, or only hewing out a new 
tomb for Christ ? You would turn off our river 
of the water of life into the desert: where are 
your living fountains ? '* And the fact that the in- 
fidels of that day had literally nothing to offer, in 
place of that whereof they would rob us, armed 
the great mass of the solid races they addressed 
against their sophistries. 

But all that is changed now. Infidelity itself 
came to feel that it was nothing but a hungry 
void, a wall around a howling wilderness. Logi- 
cally, and (no doubt) spiritually also, this want of 
a positive belief made itself felt. It was like the 
hushing of sweet voices at home, that we might 
listen to jackals and hyenas snarling without, to 
take away the Bible, and give us the ''Age of 
Reason." Man was made for a gospel; and he 
that takes away one must at least profess to give 
him another. 

I have not forgotten that remarkable phase of 
modern infidelity, anthropotheism, which teaches 
man that he is his own God. By no means new, 
it is newly dressed. It brews a nitrous-oxide gas 
of self-adulation out of science and progress, and 
therewith amuses and exhilarates its famishing 
hours. There will alway be an atheistic element 



28 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAOTNG? 

in human thought, as there are always black bars 
in the solar spectrum. It is an unsound mental 
condition, almost entirely confined to one portion 
of the scientific class, — a hypertrophy of the in- 
tellect. It is the exceptional form of infidelity. 
The normal form in this age is pantheism.^ 

Not always calling itself by its name, however. 
It is eclecticism, spiritualism, free religion, what 
not. But substantially they agree in this: that 
all things are only shows or temporary forms of 
God ; that they are nothing, except as they are He. 
By consequence, all religions are more or less true ; 
are mere phenomena, meteoric clouds, through 
which the impassive earth drifts, whether they 
shed a faint lustre on our darkness, or pour a hot 
iron rain upon our heads. In neither case is the 
earth responsible. 

But we are not at present concerned with the 
fallacy or the absurdity of these notions. My 
point is this: Infidelity has now taken such an 
attitude that it can at one and the same time deny 
a personal God, and borrow the devoutest language 
of any age — of the Bible itself — wherein to utter 
its spurious religiosity. 

More : it has laboriously drawn to itself the sen- 
timents and practices of Christianity, as well as the 
words which belong of right to faith, and, having 
extracted and cast away whatever of gospel life 
and truth were in them, has' adorned itself with 
1 See note at end of cliaiDter. 



ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 29 

the empty remainder. It is deluging literature 
every day with this sham devoutness. How elo- 
quent it is of heavenly aspirations ! how weary of 
a gross, passionate, sinful world ! What wonder- 
ful things it says of the All-Father ! twangs its lute, 
and sings David's Psalms. 

But let us come to particulars, and I will pause 
for but one, the ordinance of prayer. 

Let it be distinctly understood that prayer, 
offered in good faith, absolutely demands a per- 
sonal God, and confesses itself to be empty wind 
without him. Also, that the infidelity of to-day, 
when treating the matter doctrinally, repudiates 
prayer as understood by Christians, both because 
it denies the personality of God, and because it so 
holds the fixity of laws of nature as to pronounce 
answers to prayer impossible, and the seeking them 
futile and childish. 

Then infidelity rejects and forbids prayer? 
Oh, dear, no ! not at all. Its novels, its poems, 
its sermons, are full of prayers, and sentimental 
talk about prayer. True, the philosophical theory 
of prayer is, that it is mere aspiration, Avhose sole 
virtue is reflexive; i.e., that one is naturally so 
much the better, in nature or at least in comfort, 
for having used these pious expressions. But away 
with, abstractions, down with definitions ! Let our 
heroines, and sometimes even our heroes, pray 
away, and levy on the resources of Paul and Isaiah 
and David and Moses for the words to do it with. 



30 THE light: is it \yaking? 

Man will not be balked of this reverent speech; 
and we glory in being able to borrow it for his en- 
joyment, though Ave deny David's God, and reject 
Christ, whose apostle and martyr Paul was. 

So far has this impropriation of Scripture lan- 
guage to infidel purposes gone, as to suggest and 
justify the sarcasm, that while the infidels claim 
to have rid themselves of the letter of revelation, 
and retained its spirit, the truth is just the other 
way: they have rid themselves of the spirit, and 
retained the letter.^ 

If I were simply marshalling charges against 
infidelity, I should pursue this, line of indictment 
a good deal farther. Here I only add : What a 
prodigious vitalizing power is this of which Chris- 
tianity is compact, that even its deadly foe, its 
daily traducer, its irreconcilable contrary, borrows 
its speech, trades upon its capital, levies upon its 
mighty riches, even while engaged in the effort to 
destroy it ! The iron, that grinds against the 
magnet, is imperfectly but manifestly magnetized. 

Even tills, however, is only a comment by the 
way. The point I make is that infidelity, thus 
tinted with the colors of Christianity, is to that 
extent the less strikingly diverse therefrom exte- 
riorly. 

If now we turn to the other great antagonist 
of Biblical religion, superstition, we shall find that 
a wonderful change has taken place here also, and 
in the same direction. 

, 1 Henry Rogers, in The Eclipse of Faith. 



AKOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 31 

This word " superstition " applies as a title, ge- 
nerically, to all forms of belief in the supernat- 
ural which are not integral parts of Bible faith. 
Whatever sets forth our obligations to the living 
God, in respect of actions or of character ; what- 
ever rests frankly on his inspired word ; whatever 
recognizes him as the only seat of supernatural 
power, — all that, whether it be sound and accurate 
or not, may fairly claim a place under the title, 
religion. Contrariwise, all wonders that involve 
no idea of duty ; that impute to persons, things, 
or events, a magical, that is to say, an extra-legal, 
power ; that throw the great King into the back- 
ground, and exalt earthly trifles to reverence at 
his expense, — they are the products, as they are 
the food, of superstition. 

In earlier periods, the superstitions of modera 
times took the place of heathen mythologies. 
Woods, lakes, clouds, winds, hills, all had their 
unearthly or semi-earthly tenants and powers. 
Brownies, pixies, fairies, goblins, witches, elves, an 
innumerable throng, held carnival upon the fears 
and fancies of mankind. The first volume of 
legendary lore was almost everywhere the pagan ; 
the second was the elfic. What is the third, and 
so far the last ? 

I have no desire to blink the pitiful truth that 
there are still believers' in witches and conjurors; 
nor that a new form of necromancy, which calls it- 
self spiritualism, — meaning precisely the opposite, 



32 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

viz., the material appearance and life of so-called 
spirit, — lias had wide vogue in these last days. 
It would be easy to show that this delusion has 
borrowed all its gilding from Christianity; but let 
that pass. Let it stand, if you please, as an ex- 
ception to that which I now proceed to allege. It 
will be none the less true that while these crude 
and gross delusions are steadily djdng out of the 
world, the superstitious element reveals itself un- 
der certain forms of church life, in that extraordi- 
nary style of misbelief which we call ritualism. 

While the true spiritual life finds its secret 
spring in faith, ritualism stands upon vestments, 
words, and rites. It has its incantations,. its ma- 
nipulations, its postures and charms and artificial 
mysteries. It relegates God, and God's dear Son, 
to a dim, impersonal distance, and blurs the very 
air between with incense and ceremony. Look 
across broad Christendom, begin with the churches 
of the East, traverse the Greek and Papal hierar- 
chies, and include the ritualistic section of the 
Episcopal Church in England and America ; and 
what have you in them all, but the lodgement of 
power in things below God, — that is to say, a 
superstition? 

The same, yet not the same ! Superstition, in 
this form, is an elaborate travesty of the Christian 
religion ; nay, claims to he that religion. Its un- 
baptized wonders, like its unshrived dead, are 
hustled out of sight, and stripped of observance. 



ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 33 

When they re-appear, lo ! the chrism is upon them, 
and the holy sign; and the susurrus of gospel 
phrase entices the ear. 

Hypocrisy has been called "the homage that 
vice pays to virtue." In the same way, ritualism 
may be called the homage which superstition pays 
to Christianity. 

Here also, therefore, we find the outward con- 
trast, the distance which solicits the eye, between 
religion and the world, lessened b^ the change with 
which religion has affected the world. It is her own 
victory which makes her the less conspicuous. 

Note. — It may be thought that I have shown scant 
courtesy to that great mass of "advanced thought," called 
scientific, in passing it by with only a casual comment. But, 
in truth, that portion of infidelity which names itself of 
science had no proper place in the argument of this chapter. 
For it does most diligently endeavor to keep itself clear of 
all things that smack of Scripture, whether words or ideas ; 
and, indeed, is ambitious to be recognized as the one uncom- 
promising, sleepless adversary of those beliefs which are dis- 
tinctively Christian. It will have no God mentioned, nei- 
ther soul nor vital force, nor immortality, nor creation, nor 
atonement, nor general judgment. It scouts prayer. In the 
mouths of some, it denies moral accountability, and even a 
distinctive moral nature. 

The effect of Christianity on such an element, therefore, 
will not be found in perverted words, nor eviscerated pious 
. sentiments, nor windy religiosities of any style. Yet it is 
not far to seek. 

The affirmation which these advanced thinkers continu- 
ally make, the most impressive of their maxims, and that 
which gives dignity to their protests against Christian doc- 



34 THE light: is it waning? 

trine, is the sacred obligation of truth. Other men are con- 
tent with half-truths, or old customary notions that are not 
even half true. Other men may be biased by interest, or 
scared by the cry of * heretic ' or ' infidel.' Other men may 
indolently endure doubt, or evade the confession of doubt ; 
but not they. They, at least, realize the religious obliga- 
tions of belief, and of the profession of that which they 
believe, and nothing else, less or more. If the Bible is 
proved not to be divine, to be not even historically or scien- 
tifically correct ; if the doctrine of rewards and punishments 
is seen to be an immoral doctrine, — why, then, though the 
heavens fall, justice must be done, and truth spoken. 

To all this we (Christians) emphatically agree. For the 
question is not, at this moment, whether their doctrines are 
wise or foolish, but whether men shall profess to believe 
only what they do believe, and have satisfactory grounds 
for believing. And there we have just as clear views, and 
as decided a conscience, as they. If they succeed as they 
think in announcing that view more eloquently than we, 
why, so much the better for them. 

But whence came they by this much-vaunted chivalry 
to truth'? Is this doctrine of the religious obligation of 
belief one of their discoveries, and the latest boon of the 
ages? 

By no means. They owe it to that very Church and that 
very Bible which they assail, and against which they apply 
it. One of the many services which Isaac Taylor, as a 
Christian philosopher, rendered his age, was the setting in 
clear light the fact that this paramount obligation of man 
to truth in religion was unknown to classical antiquity, and 
was wrought out through a century and a half of torture 
and blood by the martyr Church. 

" The virtue and duty of truthfulness, as between man 
and man, had been taught, and well enough understood, 
among ancient nations, whether more or less advanced in 



ANOTHER LOOK AT THE SAME MATTER. 35 

civilization. And so had the religious sanctions of morality. 
But the one 1 esson which remained to be brought out, and to 
be wrought into the hearts of men, was the religious obli- 
gation OF BELIEF ; an obligation not resting upon communi- 
ties as a public or social charge, but pending with the whole 
of its weight upon the conscience of the individual man ; 
an obligation personal, a privilege inalienable, and, when 
duly discharged, a function giving the individual man a 
pledge of his immortality. . . . [This is] the axiom on 
which hinges the immeasurable moral difference between 
classical antiquity and the modern mind."^ 

But my object in drawing attention to this matter is not 
at all to deny them the abstract right to use it (however 
easy it would be to show that they misuse it), nor even to 
taunt them, with any bitterness, about their drawing upon 
the wisdom and moral power of that Church which they hold 
in such evil esteem. I hold by my own argument: this 
borrowing, and wearing in public view, of the insignia of 
the Church of Christ, with the King's broad arrow embroid- 
ered upon it, obscures the distinction between the body of 
faith and the body of unbelief ; and thus, again, Christianity 
is the less conspicuous by reason of her victories. 

It is probably clear to every reader that I am not attempt- 
ing to expose the fallacies or controvert the errors of any 
form of infidelity. I have simply to illustrate, as briefly 
and forcibly as I can, the historical truth, that Christianity 
as a living power has so wrought upon its deadliest enemies 
that it has changed them into something of its own image, 
and that this accounts in part for the fact that it seems less 
prominent and signal now than in some other days. 

I might go farther, and show how the more definite lan- 
guage and more solid beliefs of the Church of the present 
day have compelled a more rational and (in some sense) 
religious style of disbelief than that of old. But this and 

1 Restoration of Belief, pp. 66, 67. 



36 THE light: is it WAIsriNG? 

other similar theorems hardly need treatment here. We 
see Christianity, like a lofty light-tower, irradiating alike 
the waves of infidelity that beat upon her rocky base, the 
dank marsh of superstition that rolls up its poisonous mists 
against her lights, and the myriad interests of Christendom 
that flit like freighted vessels over the sea of time. 



A LAST WORD ON THIS POINT. 37 



CHAPTER IV. 

A LAST WORD ON THIS POINT. 

BUT we are, fortunately, able to clincli this 
argument with a mass of facts which irre- 
ligion ridiculed while it could, ignored when ridi- 
cule had spent itself in vain, and now misrepresents 
in detail as it can no longer deny in bulk. I 
allude to that glory of the age, foreign missions. 

It would be entirely within my right, of course, 
to found on them an argument of this sort : That 
in this very century, when so much is said of the 
failing life and power of Christianity, she has 
actually become more aggressive, and won larger 
territories from Pagandom, and shed a wider benefi- 
cence upon mankind, than in any century since 
Trajan's; and that thus the allegation is utterly 
destroyed by the facts. 

But inasmuch as the question I am to discuss 
relates primarily to the Church in this country, 
the way is hardly open for a direct canvass of the 
foreign missionary history. It is, however, en- 
tirely germane to my argument, to establish, by a 
reference to the results of gospel labor in heathen 



38 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

lands, the very point I have been pressing ; viz., 
that it is, and always was, of the essence of Chris- 
tianity to do a revolutionary work first, and a 
progressive work afterwards. I may perhaps add 
that the most material difference between its 
achievements now and of old is that it reaches 
the second stage now more rapidly. Nations are 
now born " in a day." 

I take up, as a crucial instance, the Fiji Islands, 
one of the noblest groups of the South Pacific. 
Bearing in their persons, as they do, the evidence 
that they are a mixed race, the natives of these 
beautiful islands were, as might have been ex- 
pected of their impure blood, a people singularly 
debased in religion, vicious, violent, and miserable. 
We are fortunate enough to have an official ac- 
count of them from the commander of an explor- 
ing expedition sent out by the United States, 
which visited and surveyed the group before the 
missionaries had wrought any change in the life 
and customs of the inhabitants. And the officer 
to be quoted, Commander Wilkes, makes it abun- 
dantly evident throughout his volumes, that, while 
possessed of only kindly feelings toward the heroic 
men who, here and elsewhere, loved not their lives 
unto the death, that they might preach Christ, he 
had no faith at all in the enterprise in which they 
were engaged. There need be no suspicion, there- 
fore, that he has deepened the tints of his picture, 
that it might be the better foil to their success 
when it should come. 



A LAST WORD ON THIS POINT. 39 

I quote from the official edition, imperial octavo, 
1845, vol. iii. : — 

" Although, as we shall see, the natives of Fiji 
have made considerable progress in several of the 
useful arts [cloth-making and boat-building being 
the chief], they are in many respects the most 
barbarous and savage race now existing upon the 
globe. The intercourse they have had with white 
men has produced some effect upon, their political 
condition, but does not appear to have had the 
least influence in mitigating the barbarous ferocity 
of their character." ^ So much by way of general 
characterization. Let us come to particulars. 

On the seventy-fifth page of this volume, the 
author gives us a cut of a girl of sixteen, a fully 
developed woman, in her ordinary attire. She is 
absolutely nude, except for a fringe about three 
fingers wide around her loins, and a fillet of 
about the same width around her head. 

After an almost incredible statement (on the 
authority of white men who lived among them in 
their own way) about their systematic, exuberant, 
spontaneous lying, and after alleging that covet- 
ousness is one of the strongest features of their 
character, he goes on to make a qualifying and 
favorable remark : " I have been assured, however, 
that a white man might travel with safety from 
one end of an island to the other, provided he 
had nothing about him to excite their desire of 

1 p. 73. 



40 THE LIGHT : IS IT WANING ? 

acquisition." With these two provisos, — that one 
must be white, and that he have nothing anybody 
else wanted, — life and travel are quite safe in 
Fiji, as Capt. Wilkes was assured. But then, he 
naively adds, " It is impossible to say that even 
the most valueless article of our manufactures 
might liot be coveted by them." ^ Verily ! 

As regards marriage : while some fortunate 
couples " in high life " may have been united by 
their own choice, wives were usually and openly 
bought. Among the common people, " the usual 
price is a whale's tooth, or a musket ; and, this 
once paid, the husband has an entire right to the 
person of his wife, whom he may even kill and 
EAT if he feel so disposed." ^ 

Neither are those frightful words which I have 
emphasized a flight of fancy on the part of the 
captain. Cannibalism was an established — what 
do I say? a prized and cherished institution. It 
was the triumph of their wars, and the culminating 
point of their worship. Indeed, " sacrifices were 
made more frequent, to indulge their taste " for 
human flesh.^ 

It is painful to go into further particulars ; but 
I cannot show what Christianity has done, nor 
thoroughly illustrate my argument, without addu- 
cing such facts as are thus unexceptionably war- 
ranted to us. 

^' Their fondness for [this food] will be under- 

1 p. 76. 2 p. 92. 8 p. 101. 



A LAST WORD ON THIS POINT. 41 

stood from the custom they have of sending por- 
tions of it to their friends at a distance as an 
acceptable present ; and the gift is eaten, even if 
decomposition have begun before it is received. 
So highly do they esteem it, that the greatest 
praise they can bestow upon a delicacy is to say 
that it is as tender as a dead man." ^ 

'^Stratagem and violence are resorted to [in 
addition to war and sacrifice] for obtaining " hu- 
man flesh. Women fishing on the reefs were 
seized and carried off to be devoured.^ ^ " A feast 
frequently takes place among the chiefs, to which 
each is required to bring a pig. On these occa- 
sions Tanoa, from pride and ostentation, always - 
furnishes a human body." ^ But this must sufBce, 
though even this is not all. 

Let us look next at their religion. And the 
first thing that strikes one is, that it was absolutely 
devoid of moral quality. Even though they be- 
lieved in a life after death, there was no moral 
discrimination between the souls, except in certain 
instances, where cowardice was punished. Other- 
wise the question whether a spirit should live on, 
and undergo transmigration, or be annihilated at 
once, was a question of ''luck,"^ or the capricious 
likes and dislikes of the gods.^ 

We find, secondly, that there is no pretence of 
settled knowledge, much less any thing that could 
be called doctrine, i.e., a system of religious truth. 

1 p. 101. 2 p. 102. 3 p. 103. 4 p. 81. 5 pp. 84, 85. 



42 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

Thus, after giving a clear succinct account of the 
Fijian mythology, Commander Wilkes finds him- 
self obliged to add, " These notions, though the 
most prevalent, are not universal." ^ And he illus- 
trates this diversity by instancing their notions 
about the life beyond death. Of these he gives 
five varieties ; four of which are represented as 
prevailing respectively in four towns, while the 
fifth is a belief held by some few of the natives 
who worship an evil spirit. 

This, however, is the one point on which their 
diverse " notions " all agree ; viz., that there is a 
life after death, unless the spirits happen to get 
killed. Upon this second killing, annihilation 
ensues.^ 

But not only are they at odds upon the manner 
of the future life, not only is the belief of the 
future life so held as to give it no moral value at 
all : our author proceeds to show that this very 
belief — the most sublime of which man is capa- 
ble, save only the belief in Jehovah — is directly 
responsible for some of the worst of their horrible 
customs ; viz., the killing of the old, the sick, and 
the maimed, and the sacrifice of wives at the fu- 
neral of their husbands.^ 

The subtle savage reasons thus as it would 
seem : This life has now little or nothing more in 
it of pleasure for my father, or mother, or wife, as 
the case may be ; the life to come is probably bet- 

1 p. 84. 2 See an instance of this on p. 85. ^ p. 94. 



A LAST WORD ON THIS POINT 43 

ter, and can hardly be worse : let ns help them to 
it. It is a point of honor and affection, therefore, 
with sons, to commit these murders with their own 
hands, and often with the full consent of the 
parent to be murdered. 

There is just one thing possible, I think, which 
could add blackness to this account ; and that one 
thing is not wanting. Capt. Wilkes declares on 
the authority alike of the missionaries and of 
the other white residents, and in view of what 
he himself perceived of them afterwards, " that 
the Fijians are a kind and affectionate people to 
their parents." ^ 

Can the human mind conceive a more infernal 
slavery than that which these quotations present ? 
— a people naturally intelligent and affectionate, 
who know not with any confidence who or what 
are their gods, nor how nor where nor why they 
live beyond the grave ; all whose possessions are 
held absolutely at the disposal of the nephew of 
their chief; among whom murder is so far from 
being a crime, that it is the recognized purveyor 
of their luxury, and the last token of respect and 
care to old age. To die by violence in Fiji, forty 
years ago, it was not necessary to have an enemy : 
it was only necessary to have a son, or that some 
one have an appetite. 

If Mr. Wilkes could have revisited Fiji shortly 
before his death, what changes would he have 
seen? 

1 p. 95. 



44 THE LIGHT: IS IT WATSTESTG? 

He would have found that brutal people become 
precisely what we call a Christian community. 
Only a. part, indeed, are themselves the subjects of 
renewing grace. But the law of Christian deco- 
rum rules the land. The spirit of Christian order 
informs the government. The bells ring in the 
sabbath worship. The sons of the cannibals are 
educated and ordained ministers of the gospel, 
well named " the glorious gospel of the blessed 
God." In a word, with due allowance for differ- 
ence of race and recentness of the history, they 
are as we. They have entered, by a glad leap, 
that career which the English-speaking race have 
been running for centuries. 

The gospel is what it always was. It trans- 
forms first, and then lifts on and on, with growing 
results but declining observation, wheresoever it 
has sway. 



EVILS ADMITTED AND ACCOUNTED FOE. 45 



CHAPTER V. 

SECOND VIEW. — PRESENT EVILS ADMITTED AND 
ACCOUNTED FOR. 



I 



T is not the object of this essay, however, to 

"sew pillows to the armholes" of the watch- 
men, or to make it appear that all is well in the 
state of the Church. Having shown in previous 
chapters that our ill-wishers are too fast in infer- 
ring the decay of the Church, and the approaching 
downfall of Christianity itself, from the alleged 
but unproved decline of her light, I proceed now 
to admit that there is much to deplore in our con- 
dition ; much that weakens our hands, takes away 
our consolation, flatters the wicked hopes of the 
adversaries, breaks the hold of the gospel on sin- 
ners, and tarnishes Christ's glory. 

In the present chapter, however, I confine my- 
self to those evils which can be so accounted for 
as to show that they need not involve grave peril 
to the hopes or the salvation of man. 

Those to which I now refer may be summed up, 
perhaps, in the remark that this is a shallow age. 

Not only religion is shallow; not religion, so 



46 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

much, indeed, as many other things. In political 
life, where, in the whole world, have we a real 
statesman? In philosophy, whom have we as a 
sage ? The passions of the day are vehement, 
rather than deep. The virtue of the day is rather 
bright than rich. The contests of parties, and 
even the warlike clash of nations, are not collis- 
ions of principle, but opposition of persons or in- 
terests. This, I know, has been true in a great 
degree in all ages. But there have been such 
contests, — contests to settle great truths. The 
partisanships of the present day have very, very 
rarely any such significance. That this is no 
senile whimpering for the things that are past 
will, I hope, be presently evident. 

What concerns us at this moment, however, is 
that this same lack of depth, and of all that 
depends on depth, is almost equally apparent in 
religion. 

"^^ Amid much that is cheering, there is, on the 
other hand, much that is discouraging and distress- 
ing to the more pious observer. We behold a 
strange combination of zeal and worldly-minded- 
ness ; great activity for the extension of religion 
in the earth, united with lamentable indifference 
to the state of religion in the soul ; in short, ap- 
parent vigor in the extremities, with a growing 
torpor at the heart. ]\Iultitudes are substituting 
zeal for piety, liberality for mortification, and a 
social for a personal religion. No careful reader 



EVILS ADMITTED AND ACCOUNTED FOE. 47 

of the New Testament, and observer of the pres- 
ent state of the Church, can fail to be convinced, 
one should think, that what is now wanting is a 
high spirituality. The Christian profession is sink- 
ing in its tone of piety ; the line of separation 
between the Church and the world becomes less 
and less perceptible ; and the character of gen- 
uine Christianity, as expounded from pulpits and 
delineated in books, has too rare a counterpart in 
the lives and spirit of its professors." ^ 

Without subscribing to every word of this for- 
cible arraignment, — whose homely vigor is well 
worthy of imitation, — it must be allowed to de- 
scribe very fairly the spiritual quality of the age. 
The abundance of rootless piety; the incessant 
cultivation of sentiment, as distinguished from 
affection; the almost reckless popularization of 
religion ; the floods of namby-pamby talk ; the dis- 
appearance to so great a degree of " the deep things 
of God," in any living grasp of them, from the • 
pnlpit, — these are characteristics of the religion 
of the day that are to be honestly and deeply 
deplored. 

A remarkable religious vivacity is one of the 
striking features of the time, — a vivacity alike 
intellectual and moral. Look at the immense 
number of Sunday-school teachers, — of scholars, 
emulating each other's success in recitations and 
other efforts. Consider the daily and other prayer- 

1 An Earnest Ministry, pp. 62, 63. 



48 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

meetings, where men of every class, with and 
without culture, — with and without sound knowl- 
edge, — are encouraged to speak. Think of the 
almost infinite wayside labors, — to recover apos- 
tates, to enlighten the ignorant, to bring the god- 
less myriads to the hearing of the gospel. Blessed 
work, all of it ! So far from complaining of it, I 
would the great remaining inert mass were effectu- 
ally filled with the same spirit, and that every nook 
and corner of the land were invaded and pervaded 
by its appeals. 

But looking at the matter pliilosophically, as a 
fact in current history, two reflections immediately 
suggest themselves. 

The first is, that this wide stream cannot be 
deep. In the nature of things it cannot be. 
This countless multitude of talkers and workers 
cannot be thorough thinkers, or profoundly pious 
men and women. Genuine, frank, zealous, I am 
glad to believe them, as a whole. But nothing 
they say or do, still, as a whole, shows more than 
surface vitality. 

The second is, that we are, and must be under 
the circumstances, living very much upon the 
products of a previous race of laborers of another 
sort. We are like a generation of millers and 
corn-merchants, following a generation of farmers. 

The current thought of any given period is that 
which it inherited, as modified by present condi- 
tions. The material is chiefly of the past : the 



EVILS ADMITTED AXD ACCOUNTED FOR. 49 

coloring is of the present. This maxim, however, 
must be taken with one limitation : some ages are 
especially productive, some are elaborative. The 
first are called theoretic, the latter practical. And, 
because this is eminently a practical age, it is 
eminently a case in point, — a people engaged in 
grinding up old corn, and furnishing new styles 
of bread. 

It has seemed to me, for some time past, that 
we are approaching the close — at least the de- 
cline — of this practical age. What, so far as his- 
tory can suggest it to us, — what may be expected 
to follow it ? 

I believe that we may expect a transition-period 
of want^ of unsatisfied desires, of innovations, ex- 
periments, errors; of discontent and mistake, of 
moral and spiritual deterioration, — reforms at- 
tempted but futile; abuses denounced but sur- 
viving; outbursts of right and noble aspiration, 
blessed to the individual, but almost barren to the 
community, — until, with many throes, the new 
productive age is born. 

This will doubtless grate very harshly on the 
ears of many who are expecting the golden cen- 
turies to begin almost immediately. They see, in 
the world's material progress, the harnessing of 
all the powers of nature to Emmanuel's chariot. 
In the great revivals conducted by lay evangelists, 
they find a warrant for their wildest hopes. And 
they even suspect a stubborn unbelief in the man 



50 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

who warns them that they have need, even yet, of 
patience. 

It would be as impossible for the writer as for 
any other man to believe that the world ever really 
goes backward ; that there is any age, or any peo- 
ple, which contributes only hinderance to the plans 
of God for the salvation of mankind. To believe 
that, he should have to unlearn his rooted confi- 
dence in the sovereign providence of God. But 
then, he has never seen a spring follow an autumn 
without an intervening winter. And winter has 
his storms and rains, and needs his special precau- 
tions, all the more because spring is to come. If 
it were not coming, where would be the induce- 
ment to endure the long inclement skies and bitter 
blasts ? Winter brings its dangers, as well as its 
discomforts. They must be faced and guarded 
against, with hope in the soft safety to come. 

The conclusion to be drawn from the many 
lamentable features of present church-life is, there- 
fore, not one of alarm concerning the Church of 
Christ considered as a historical unity, whose years 
count from the cross of Calvary, and run to the 
great judgment. It is safe amid all calamities. 
Persecutions, divisions, declensions, apostasies, are 
only seasons of revolving years. The clouds come 
and go, but the world remains. And while the 
covenant endures, and the High Priest intercedes, 
and the Spirit takes the government, and the 
truth of God stands, Christ's Church will live. 
The ark will surely outride the deluge. 



EVILS ADMITTED AND ACCOUNTED FOR. 51 

This, then, is not the secret of our concern. 
There is a personal, as well as a historical, interest 
involved. The Church is safe ; but are Christians 
safe? Is their work doing, their sanctification 
advancing, their Master pleased? Are they in 
health ? Are they armed for the fight, and present 
on the field ? The battle may be won, though de- 
tachments are defeated. Are the detachments sent 
to the front in 1877 in any danger of. defeat? and, 
if so, why ? 

It will be noticed that thus far the ^dews taken 
have been comparative, as to the periods of the 
Church. We are now to make a very different 
estimate. We are to look at the features of the 
spiritual life of to-day, and inquire into their bear- 
ing alike upon our inward prosperity and our ag- 
gressive power. 

Are these two in real danger ? And, if so, from 
what sources? This will be the burden of the 
following part of this essay. 



PAET II. 



EBAL PEKHi TO THE LIGHT. 



55 



CHAPTER VI. 

BEAIi PEEIL TO THE LIGHT. 

-T-r7"E are now, in pursuance of the plan pro- 
W posed, to consider some conditions of real 
perU to the light; if not to the very existence of 
the Church, the light-holder, yet at least to its 
present keepers and its present efficiency. It is 
• not enough that the tower should stand, and the 
lenses should be in their place, and the macHnery 
remain uninjured. The tower must have manful 
and faithful inmates, the lenses must be burnished, 
the lamp trimmed, the Ught rushing forth from it 

over the sea. 

Never sailed so many vessels, bearing such pre- 
cious freight. Never stood so great a world in so 
great need. And if we may not say, never were 
there so many wrecks, we may safely say, never 
did wrecks bring home such gmlt and shame to 
the chHdren of the light, as now. For now, above 
all past ages, is there a wide diffusion of knowl- 
edge, both of truth and of our responsibility for 
its offering to man. Now pre-eminently are the 
ears and minds of men open to every sort of mes- 



56 THE light: is it waning? 

sage, plea, and invitation. Now have we models 
in every style and department of evangelical labor : , 
what sort of books should be written for children, 
for the learned, for the illiterate, for the old ; how 
to approach the infidel, how the ungodly in their 
afflictions, how the self-righteous, the convicted, 
the hardened, the despairing, or all these combined. 
Let the particular task be what it may, this inex- 
haustibly inventive age has considered it and dealt 
with it, more or less effectively, already. The 
example is already set, of serving God. with every 
sort of talent, and by every sort of labor, right 
and wrong, apt and inapt. If one would give a 
book or tract to a reader of any class or disposi- 
tion, not only is the sort of volume needed most' 
probably already prepared, but there are accom- 
plished advisers to be found, familiar with the 
books and the work, to guide in the selection. 
And it is altogether likely that the object sought, 
in the particular case, has been dealt with by some 
associated effort ; so that the intellect of the age 
may be said to have broken our paths for us. And 
yet there are terrible encumbrances upon us, and 
stumbling-blocks in the way. 

It is of them that I am now to speak. 

One of the most painful and perplexing matters 
to be considered is the present average Christian 
intelligence, the amount of instruction in doctrine, 
how shallow, slight, and pretentious it is. This 
remark is by no means inconsistent with what has 



EEAL, PERIL TO THE LIGHT. 67 

been said, either of the floods of religious talk in 
the land, or of the multitude of books and aids to 
knowledge that have been accumulating through 
the last fifty years. For, first, talk and knowledge 
do by no means vary in direct ratio, rather in- 
versely ; and, secondly, reading and study are not 
at all synonymous terms. Men read largely who 
study not at all. Indeed, it is very well under- 
stood, paradoxical as at first it may sound, that 
the secret of real ignorance in many cases is too 
many books. They give a smattering ; they tempt 
to garrulity and vain conceits of knowledge, and 
thus block the way of thorough research and prof- 
itable attainment. 

In support of this allegation as to the state of 
Christian intelligence, I have to say, in the first 
place, that it has been a common subject of remark, 
regret, and anxious consultation, among thoughtful 
pastors for years past. Many indications point 
them to the fact that sound knowledge does not 
abound: questions are asked, and answers are 
given to questions casually arising in conversation, 
objections are taken to doctrines, and expositions 
proposed of scriptures, that could only come of 
that kind of ivord-furnished ignorance wliich is a 
feature of the age. 

But perhaps no other indication is so decisive, 
or so grave, as the ease with which errorists pre- 
vail over multitudes of minds, and those usually 
of the class called intelligent. 



58 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

Some years ago a work appeared, whose almost 
incomparable English was the sole compensation 
or set-off against the weakest cluster of notions, 
and some of the very silliest expositions of Scrip- 
ture, this world, so fruitful in things silly and 
weak, has yet labored with. Often it was only 
necessary to translate them into homelier speech, to 
disenchant an admirer. And yet, easy as was the 
exposure where opportunity was given, eminent 
lawyers and physicians and merchants were car- 
ried away by it ; pious and cultivated ladies " saw 
no harm in it." Reviews, ay, and volumes, had 
to be written against it, to arrest the mischief it 
was doing. The power was in the words, and the 
poison was in the thoughts. And the style of 
intelligence at present is precisely that which 
makes words strong, and able to commend poison- 
ous thoughts. 

About the same time a pamphlet appeared in 
this country, written in opposition to the doctrine 
of the unity of the human race, which contained 
the following congeries of blunders : (1) It as- 
sumed that there are just two races, the white and 
the black ; (2) it alleged that the black race is not 
a race of moral beings, but akin to the beasts ; (3) 
that this race of un-moral beings is not permitted 
to worship, and that therefore any attempt to wor- 
ship on their part is a sin! There were many 
other absurd mistakes and paralogisms ; but these 
were of the very substance of the discussion. 



REAL PERIL TO THE LIGHT. 59 

Is it not almost incredible, that this stuff, this 
gross, ridiculous, and shameful tissue of anti-human 
talk, not only found readers, but believers ? that 
educated men, and even here and there a minister, 
were found to praise it, and accept its teachings ; 
so much so, that learned men were appealed to, to 
answer it if it could be answered? As if any 
other comment were needed than this, — that it 
opened with a blunder, and closed with a blas- 
phemy ! 

But why multiply instances ? Is there any folly 
in theology, medicine, or law, in politics, in 
finance, in science, art, or sociology, so patent, so 
flagrant, so intolerable, that it cannot gather ad- 
herents? Is there any heresy, down even to the 
no-church heresy, that cannot gather a church? 
Members of our churches have become Spiritual- 
ists. Members of Christian churches have become 
Mormons. 

Perhaps no other age ever so illustrated the 
truth that information is not knowledge. Informa- 
tion — i.e., acquaintance with fact and detail — 
abounds as never before. Knowledge, i.e., sys- 
tematized and digested information, is pitiably de- 
ficient. And for lack of tliis knowledge the peo- 
ple is destroyed. 

For, manifestly, the more information abounds, 
the more is knowledge necessary. A large mob is 
not more nearly an army than a small mob. The 
larger, the more unmanageable, the more mischiev- 



60 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

ous, the more inflammable, the more portentous, it 
is. 

It follows immediately upon this, — as the mills 
of science grind out facts, and the popular mind 
appropriates but does not possess them, — that the 
masses of men are drawn farther and farther from 
the benign sway of standard truths. For, if these 
details were distributed into their kinds, and esti- 
mated by their laws, we should have knowledge 
indeed; and we should have a thousand fallacies 
dropped into general contempt that now com- 
mand applause. The reason that the world is not 
promptly rid of them is that they are not tried by 
the established standard. Nay : the standards are 
tried by them, with surprising results. 

One man abandons his belief in the divine au- 
thority of the Scriptures because a fossil human 
skeleton has been found; another because geol- 
ogy teaches that the earth could not have been 
made, such as it was made, in six ordinary days; 
another because it is inconsistent with his views 
of the laws of Nature that miracles should be 
wrought, or prayer should procure an answer. 
And so on, almost without end. 

Now, I am not to canvass these several positions. 
That has been done, and well done, many times. 
My point is, that great truths, already wrought 
into the great scheme of truth, are thrown over, 
and the whole body of human ^ belief brought to 
disorder, under the influence of some half-learned 



REAL PERIL TO THE LIGHT. 61 

and half-weighed detail of knowledge or notion, 
and the safe and noble order of reason reversed. 

So far, the world that hears the gospel. How is 
it, as regards sound doctrine, with professed be- 
lievers and ordained ministers ? Many there are 
— and we can never cease to thank God for it — 
who stand bravely, and once for all, by "the law 
and the testimony." But if we turn our ear from 
that clear and steadfast proclamation of the faith 
once delivered to the saints, and listen to such 
other voices as may seek a hearing, what a Babel 
bursts upon us ! Pre-existence of souls, regene- 
ration by moral suasion, the religion of philan- 
thropy, the ethics of expediency, the Bible to be 
judged by man's moral intuitions, inspiration re- 
duced to genius, the gospel of physical strength, 
the gospel of aspiration, eternity of matter, mil- 
lenarianism, science the new Bible, the nineteenth 
century to sit in judgment on God's word, and 
to select what it shall be pleased to believe (the 
twentieth century, of course, to have the same 
privilege): why, these that I have named — and 
they are enough to dizzy one's brain — are only 
the first syllables of -the clamor of the semi-infidel 
Church of the day ; only a handful of the fruits 
of that prolific lie, that truth is — whatever a man 
is disposed to believe. 

Next, it follows, that as the principles of ethics 
are truths, — and fundamental truths have lost 
their reverence, — moral questions are all becoming 



62 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

unsettled, and moral judgments, whether of the 
individual, or the Church, or public opinion, lose 
much, and with many they lose all, their weight. 
The binding force of a vow, be it marriage-vow or 
vow of ordination ; oaths of office or of evidence ; 
covenants, treaties, bonds, notes, debts, — like a 
storm-racked ship, all the timbers are fretting and 
playing, all the joints are loosed, and the seams 
opening. 

This is not to be taken, indeed, to mean that 
all persons have ceased to be bound. Thank God ! 
we are far enough from such a frightful condition 
as that. But, as regards society, the allegation is 
just. The whole head is sick; and, now that 
financial distress is wearing out our fortitude, the 
whole heart is faint. 

Public opinion on moral subjects was once, and 
to a very influential degree, a unit in this country. 
For some time, even after the chaos of faith (to 
borrow a strong phrase of Mr. Rogers) had set in, 
there was no reason to doubt what the judgment 
of society would be upon an unfaithful wife, or a 
defaulting officer, or a perjured witness, or an evil- 
doer in the ministry. Neither is there any doubt 
now what the prevalent voice will be in any such 
case. The ominous fact is, that there will be 
many voices instead of one ; and they may range 
all the way from solemn condemnation to ap- 
plause. 

That is precisely the reason why wrong-doers 



BEAL PERIL TO THE LIGHT. 63 

are so much less afraid of the public sentiment 
than of yore ; because that sentiment is so divided, 
its force is dissipated. The moral power of the 
community is weakened by as much as its unanim- 
ity is destroyed. 

And when, coincidently with this severance in 
public opinion itself, the spirit of reverence is found 
to be exhaling^ a day of spiritual danger has verily 
arrived. Is not reverence, the glory of youth and 
the grace of old age, — is not reverence manifestly 
declining ? 

It results inevitably from two excellent features 
of the time, — the exposure of old fallacies, and 
the cultivation of mental independence. The 
debris of old maxims, notions, institutions, strews 
the land, as the shells of the seventeen-year cicada 
strew the woods of New Jersey. Their time was 
out, and they had to go : the world had no more 
room nor tolerance for them. But they leave us, 
necessarily, the knack of questioning, and the habit 
of demolition, — of looking on old things as can- 
didates for the hammer and fire. And this, of 
course, develops a spirit that is proud of not lean- 
ing on antiquated supports, and is only too ready 
to call any thing antiquated that is not new. This 
spirit not only insists on testing afresh all things 
that are clearly doubtful, which is the sacred duty 
of every generation, but it discards that most 
wholesome principle which accepts provisionally 
what has been hitherto believed, and throws the 



64 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

burden of proof on whoever assails it. Now, the 
irreverent mind of the age, so much of it as there 
may be, holds under indictment whatsoever has 
come down from a former generation, because it 
has come down. 

It can hardly be counted a digression, though 
the remark be not in the direct line of my argu- 
ment, if I mention in passing the vast change that 
has taken place, through the operation of this 
spirit, in the relations of parents and children. 
More and more are children coming to believe 
that they are the final cause, of parents. More 
and more does parental authority decay, does filial 
authority assert itself. That each is for the other, 
is a golden truth. That either is all, is flat heresy, 
and portends social ruin where it is received. 



DECAY OF AUTHOEITY IN THE CHURCHES. 65 



CHAPTER VII. 

SUBJECT CONTINUED. — DECAY OF AUTHOEITY IN 
THE CHURCHES. 

THESE reflections lead us directly to a matter 
of vast importance, — a sorely evil omen, if it 
be not eitlier controlled and reversed, or substi- 
tuted by some better thing. I refer to the decay 
of authority in the churches ; not now in respect 
of doctrine, but of discipline. 

Let us waive entirely, for the present, the divine 
origin of the Church; not that it will bear to be 
waived in fact, but because, being waived just 
now, it will add force to the conclusion to which 
we shall be led. Let us, then, waive it ; and con- 
sider simply that organization implies, and finds its 
use in, unity of impact upon whatever matters it is 
intended to effect. 

We organize an army to crush resistance, or to 
repel aggression ; a railroad company, to accom- 
plish the transportation of a region ; a government, 
to sum up the energies of a people for the main- 
tenance of order at home, and safety and influence 
abroad. In each case, the vital necessity, so far as 



66 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

the object sought is concerned, is, that the whole 
mass shall work as one. The elements of which it 
is composed maj be as discordant as they please* 
in all other relations; but the force of the blow 
depends completely, though not exclusively, on 
the solidity of the mass. 

I shall no more need to tell my readers for what 
the Church was organized, than ly whom it was 
called into being. The invasion and conquest of 
a world, this is what our Leader planned. There- 
fore is He called, with admirable significance, the 
" Captain of our salvation : " '' Captain," to unify 
and guide the assault ; '' salvation," the result of 
every partial success, and of the whole long war. 

We are enrolled for this work ; and it is to be 
done — on its human side — by two methods, — the 
bringing individuals, as such, under the power of 
grace, and the Christianization of society. These 
are not necessarily coterminous operations ; i.e., 
operations that proceed with equal rapidity or 
result. Either may, for a time, outrun the other. 
Each has its turns of comparative prosperity. But 
both are essential to the final effect. 

The sinner must be individualized either con- 
sciously and avowedly by private effort, or uncon- 
sciously and as by a bow drawn at a venture from 
the pulpit or the book. Yet even here a large part 
of the impressiveness of what is said is due to the 
mighty bulk behind the speaker. It is A or B 
that delivers^ the words; but it is the Christian 



DECAY OF AUTHOEITY IN THE CHUECHES. 67 

Churcli, the Church of the wide earth, the Church 
of all the ages, that speaks by his mouth. 

Even at this point, therefore, the vast impor- 
tance of a virtual unity — an unity that can make 
itself heard even when it cannot be seen — is 
suflBciently apparent. But when we turn to the 
other portion of the enterprise, viz., the conver- 
sion and elevation of society, what can be more 
manifest than that unity of impression at any given 
point is absolutely essential to any normal success ? 
As well expect the iceberg, when distributed into 
cartloads, to cut its deep grooves in the trap or 
granite, as society to be new-shaped by a church 
without a common character. 

At this point of the argument, many will hasten 
to object, that, in fact^ the churches are not one, 
but many; not only numerous, but diverse in 
style, in history, in doctrine, in ritual, in govern- 
ment. They will remind me that this is the oppro- 
brium of the Protestant world ; that Papists retort 
upon us for calling Rome Babylon, by calling us 
Babel; that it is only lately that the various 
denominations have been upon peaceable, not to 
say friendly, terms with one another. 

A great deal of that sort has been said and sung 
of late years ; nor am I willing to seem without 
some sympathy with this ardent desire for visible 
oneness in the Church, in so far as that desire 
grows out of love to Christ and his cause. What- 
ever burns to serve him is thereby greatly com- 
mended to me. 



68 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

But the bearing of this fact (viz., the division 
of the Christian body into denominations) on this 
argument will be found to be strong, and to con- 
firm the views to which the argument has been 
leading us ; as thus : — 

It is the absence, it is the impossibility, of this 
visible, external unity, which brings before us, in 
something more nearly approaching its real impor- 
• tance, the inner unity, " the unity of the spirit in 
the bond of peace." Just because the Church can 
never be wielded from without, as one mass, it is 
vital that it should he a mass, — a living, self- 
moving mass. 

During a great battle, if the general in com- 
mand should be disabled or killed, with no compe- 
tent successor within reach, only one thing could 
save the army from overthrow ; viz., that the thing 
to be done should be obvious to the whole host, 
and that, inspired throughout its multitudes with 
the passion of victory, they should pour out their 
floods of fire and steel as by one impulse. A 
lava-stream needs no commander. 

Now that the denominations are coming more 
and more nearly into line upon the questions. 
What constitutes Cliristian character? and. What 
is essential to Christian decorum? now that the 
world is so stubbornly seeking to recover its lost 
place within the Church, — the indispensableness 
of churchly authority stands out in strong relief. 
Each community is to be impinged upon by the 



DECAY OF AUTHORITY IN THE CHUKCHES. 69 

people of the cross, and permeated with the spirit 
of the cross. In order to that, each separate 
church must make one impression of uprightness, 
of unworldliness, of peace. Each cluster of 
churches must make a chord, if not absolute uni- 
son, in their voice concerning duty and right. 
But in order to that one impression, and in order 
to that accord, there must be government, or that 
government must be temporarily substituted by 
an overwhelming display of the power of the 
Spirit. And that display must superinduce, again, 
government. Let every soul be subject to the 
higher powers. 

And now, what is the fact ? The voice of the 
official rulers is still heard ; but is it heeded as of 
old ? Is discipline enforced, or enforcible, except in 
extreme cases? Conferences, assemblies, conven- 
tions, have spoken, and spoken clearly, soundly, 
forcibly, with regard to certain worldly amuse- 
ments, as the theatre and circus, and certain im- 
moral practices, such as gambling with lottery- 
tickets. I do not ask. Have they been obeyed? 
for there have been transgressors in all ages ; but. 
Have they been enforced ? Is any general enforce- 
ment attempted? Barring certain happy excep- 
tions, is not public opinion, and the sense of public 
duty, felt to be so far relaxed that discipline, for 
any thing less than gross and flagrant offences 
which society itself condemns, would be lightning- 
less thunder? 



70 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

Take another case. All the denominations are 
engaged in great enterprises, at home and abroad, 
which require large outlay of money; and that 
money they must obtain by contributions among 
their people and from their churches. The proper 
officers make their estimates, and report them to 
the controlling body, whatever it may be. They 
are there carefully canvassed, revised, and adopted, 
and laid by authority before the local churches for 
their action as in duty bound. 

It is notorious that those calls for contribu- 
tions are disregarded by just about one-half the 
churches in each connection. Could there be a 
clearer proof of the decay of authority? It is not 
that the sums called for are not raised, and that 
thus enormous debts are incurred, to the manifest 
dishonor of Christ ; it is not of that I speak now. 
It is that the attempt to ohey is not made by half 
the churches. 

And all this is done by those whoprofess Christ: 
there is the appalling part of it. Ministers and 
other officers neglect the duty they have vowed to 
do, or are prevented from discharging it by the 
churches themselves. 

Alas ! must we confess it, that his authority 
also has undergone decay? He "visited the earth, 
and watered it" with his blood. He loved its 
people unto the death, and out of the pit. He 
stands, alike their representative and their king, 
in the courts of glory. If the wide universe con- 



DECAY OF AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCHES. 71 

tains a being whose lightest wish ought to weigh 
with ITS against a world, that being is Jesus Christ. 
There can be no right to rule over us that does 
not vest in him. They are dark days for mankind 
when the authority of Christ over his Church 
wanes and fades away. 

It is evident that no reply to these allegations, 
such as the rehearsal of great sums raised for pur- 
poses of religion and benevolence, or the produc- 
tion of instances in which exemplary discipline has 
been maintained, — no such reply can avail, sim- 
ply because my proposition is not that there is no 
life nor zeal left in the Church, but that a visible 
and grave declension is taking place. The light 
is not extinguished, thank God ! but it burns by 
no means so brightly as it should ; not so brightly, 
in some directions^ as once it did. 

Can either of these positions be assailed? 



72 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

KATUEAL OPERATION OF CERTAIN MORAL 
CAUSES. 

I PROPOSE in this chapter to describe the 
way in which human nature works out of cer- 
tain of its blessings and its best estate when left 
to itself. 

It is a grave and pregnant truth, that man never 
" continueth long in one stay ; " that what he has, 
or does, or is, propels him inevitably out of his 
present condition ; as inevitably as the eating and 
digestion of to-day's food expels particles of his 
present frame, and builds-in others in their stead. 
Stated in this bald, general form, there may be 
many to question it: yet everybody knows and 
says that prosperity breeds luxury; that trials 
harden the frame, and enrich the heart ; in a word, 
that to-day is the child of yesterday and the parent 
of to-morrow, — all which is contained implicitly 
in the aphorism above. 

What concerns us now in it is the gradual im- 
poverishment of the Christian life under the prac- 
tice of its duties and the lawful enjoyment of its 



OPERATION OF CERTAIN MORAL CAUSES. 73 

blessings, unless that natural result is some way- 
prevented. And I take two instances, — the natu- 
ral history of Christian emotion, and the natural 
history of Christian labor. 

It cannot be too emphatically said that genuine 
spiritual life, beginning or newly developing, kin- 
dles emotion. Feeling, no matter how deep, is in 
itself nowise unwholesome. Each of man's sev- 
eral lives — the physical, mental, social, spiritual 
— has its appropriate group of appetites and pas- 
sions ; and it is an integral part of life that they 
should be called into play in their degree. So 
far, therefore, from looking askance upon profound 
' or lively feeling on religious subjects, I am free to 
say that the soul that is entirely without them 
has no religious life, and that the religion which 
should not produce them at all could not have 
come from God. 

A gulf opening at one's feet ; waves of endless 
woe beating in its dim recesses with sullen thun- 
der ; self-help impossible ; man's help -futile ; the 
infinite loneliness of a soul that must deal directly 
with God concerning its doom, — these on one 
side : on the other, a face of awful sweetness, a 
voice of melting love, a hand of kingly power; 
stains of blood on robes of glory ; a personal De- 
liverer and Friend ; a river of grace flowing down 
from his throne ; a tide of ransomed souls flowing 
in, into the heavenly haven ; a hold, for you and 
for me, on that " inheritance of the saints in 



74 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

light;" the riddle of death read; the sting of 
death taken away ; the coming thither with songs 
and everlasting joy upon our heads : why, there 
are no other such trumpet-calls to tears, and 
songs, and the ecstasy compared with which both 
songs and tears are shallow, as these. 

How deep, how violent, how permanent, these 
emotions may prove in any particular case, is a 
question partly of degree of enlightenment, but 
mainly of temperament. But, in their several 
measures, all who really see and hear with the 
senses of the soul, all will be moved and stirred. 

Accordingly, periods of revival are marked by 
nothing more impressive than the quickened, 
* deepened feeling that pervades the community. 
People who had completely lost their relish for 
the worship of God now again take delight there- 
in. People who had been the hane of their pas- 
tor's preaching, because they sat in unresponsive 
stolidity through all his appeals ; people whom he 
had learned to think of as his icebergs, — now 
thrill and weep, and still deplore their own hard- 
heartedness, and take shame to themselves be- 
cause they feel so little. 

And the pastor, too, — his words were, even in 
his own view, but lead : now they are, to all but 
himself, life. How the hard voice softens, and 
the cold eye kindles, though it be suffused with 
tears, and the awaking heart ^ beats against the 
ribs, and the shepherd yearns, with longings that 
cannot be uttered, for his flock ! 



OPERATION OF CERTAIN MORAL CAUSES. 75 

Now the mighty hand is laid upon the impeni- 
tent. It is the hand that wakes the dead; and 
they arise, and come forth from their graves of vice 
and sin, from drink and lust and unbelief. They 
shudder at themselves ; they are amazed at God ; 
they melt before Christ. 

These words, I know, do but very poorly and 
lamely set forth the rise of the tide of life in any 
congregation or city where a great revival has set 
in. Its pathos and sublimity, its blessing for the 
present, and its fruit for "the ages to come," can 
never be told. 

What follows this " high day " ? What follows 
it, that is to say, by the laws of our mental and 
moral nature ? 

What but that very shallowing of emotions 
which we have already found and lamented as a 
present fact ? Just as surely as the Gulf Stream, 
flowing northward, draws up its depths and 
broadens its surface, does the stream of joy and 
sorrow if left to itself, shorn of its profounder 
riches and expending its force, grow general, inef- 
fective, characterless. 

" If left to itself : " that qualification must not 
be lost sight of here for even a moment. It is not 
the necessary^ but only t]iQ'natural history, we are 
following. With that qualification, the rule is, as 
nearly as possible, absolute. Be it man or woman, 
■be it church, be it a continent, wrought-up feeling 
does not merely spend itself : it comes up out of 



76 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

the deep places, and plays idly upon the surface. 
It leaves the heart for the breast. 

It is not diJfficult to trace this process in con- 
sciousness. Let us take a case with which, alas ! 
the whole world is familiar, the grief of a great 
bereavement. A child is taken away out of his 
mother's arms. That bruised heart, when it can 
think of itself, is impressed by nothing so much 
as its own inability to feel. That is almost a test 
of deep and genuine emotion. The proof of her 
profound feeling is her absorption in her loss. 
Such anguish is not clamorous, even to one's own 
consciousness ; but it silently takes possession. It 
takes the sheen out of the sunlight, the charm out 
of loved faces, the interest out of all the dear 
trifles of domestic life. Jacob is in a horrible soli- 
tude because he thinks Benjamin has followed 
Joseph out of the world. True, he has ten sons 
left ; but what are they ? 

But weary time keeps steadily on. Sorrow that 
was a passion becomes a habit. The face has 
"learned the trick of grief," and wears the expres- 
sion into which it has settled down. But why has 
it " settled down " ? Once it could not. Each 
new pang brought its own convulsive distortion. 
Every feature wrought to tell the tale of woe. 
For a time those paroxysms return, but less and 
still less peremptorily. The deeps are yet dark, 
but they are becoming calm. One at this point 
may become all the more conscious of her grief, 
because less absorbed in it. 



OPEKATION OF CERTAIX MOEAL CAUSES. 77 

And now love of the living, and care for what- 
ever concerns them, little or large, begins to re- 
assert itself. Home interests, and then interests 
beyond the home, begin to take the eye and ear 
and thought. True, they all take a sombre tint 
from this grief. So have I seen a gulf-stream 
wave blown into the shoal water, and lying there, 
an exquisite bit of turquoise set in beryl; but it 
was a mere film, and it was spread upon the sea. 
Just thus, the colder, larger mass of the mother's 
life bears up this one grief, which diffuses itself 
over all and tinges all. It is genuine ; it is last- 
ing ; but it no longer absorbs. 

Now, this process, affecting a whole people and 
its religious life, will give us this result, a steadily 
shallowing emotion, as the general character. But 
two grave dangers develop themselves during and 
upon this transition, always on the supposition 
that nothing intervenes to overrule natural ten- 
dencies. 

The first and slighter danger, but formidable 
indeed, is the translation of emotion into senti- 
ment, without timely discovery of the change. 

Profound is the distinction between feeling that 
is produced by facts, and feelings that are pro- 
duced by fancy. And it makes no sort of differ- 
ence whether that with which the fancy deals is 
itself a fact, or not. In the first case, our natures 
are effected by the facts immediately ; in the sec- 
ond, mediately. In the one, truths impinge upon 



78 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

US with their own force and from their proper direc- 
tion; in the other, we play upon them, and give 
them such quality and bearing as our own natures 
supply. In the one case, they are the weapons of 
God; in the other, the playthings of men. 

And yet how like they may seem ! Among a 
thousand hearers, there shall be but a hundred — 
perhaps but a poor score — who distinguish be- 
tween the preaching of the heart and the preach- 
ing of the imagination.^ And of that hundred, 
or of that score, the larger part will be conscious 
only of a yague dissatisfaction and disappointment, 
a something wanting, to make this feast food. 
Only here and there a listener understands that 
the thing lacking is eye-witness^ a personal pres- 
ence among the facts spoken of. That inspired 
thinker, Paul, has expressed it in a phrase that 
should be classical, — "having tasted the power 
of the world to come." To " taste of death " is to 
die, to have a personal experience of death: so 
also, to " taste the powers of the world to come " 
is to make trial, in one's own person, of its- powers ; 
to speak what we know, and testify what we have 
seen. 

The lack of this eye-witness-ship results either 
in cold intellectuality, or — and that is the present 
point — in luscious description, fulsome epithet, 
artificial pathos and decoration. It draws " tears, 

1 I use the word here in its larger, not its philosophical mean- 
ing. 



OPERATION OF CERTAESr MORAL. CAUSES. 79 

idle tears ; " it wins admiration ; it evolves a tran- 
sient and barren enthusiasm ; it creates an utterly- 
spurious spirituality, a self-congratulating, self- 
conscious religiosity, than which there is no more 
irremovable barrier to true piety. 

How dreadful is the self-complacency with which 
manj^ a well-dressed and intelligent audience re- 
tires from what it calls " divine service " ! The 
service of God : ah ! it involves " humbling one's 
self to walk with " him ; ^ it is sitting at Christ's 
feet, ashamed and sorry, and being comforted — 
even \Vhile the sense of sin is deepening — by the 
voice of the Spirit in our hearts, " I am he that 
blotteth out thy transgressions as a thick cloud." 
It is going away more than ever out of conceit 
with one's self, more than ever self-devoted to his 
will. 

Sentiment substitutes a deed with a pleasant 
song, a life with a pensive look, and enjoys doing 
it. 

Many of the more or less novel religious ap- 
pliances of the day serve the purposes of senti- 
ment every whit as well as of true religion. Many 
" pious " books are mere cups of eaii sucree. 
Many gushing Sunday-school orators run pure 
froth. And the people love to have it so : there is 
the terror. Words that touch the surface of feel- 
ing, words that tickle the idle intellect, — these 
take the place of the solid things of God ; and 

1 Mic. vi. 8, margin. 



80 THE light: is it waning? 

the Church is not indignant, not nauseated, not 
swift and peremptory in the demand that this Bar- 
mecide's feast take itself instantly away, and let 
our table be supplied with bread from heaven. 

The other and more serious evil resulting from 
this shoaling-up of Christian feeling does yet so in- 
terlock with that of which I have been speaking, 
that it has not been possible not to anticipate it in 
some degree. Nevertheless, it must have special 
mention and protest. It is — cant. 

Cant is the insincere appropriation of words to 
our talk ; that is, of words whose use involves a 
profession, which profession is not true. It rings 
hollow, sometimes by reason of the listlessness 
with which the phrase is spoken, sometimes by the 
foreign aspect of the phrase in the place where it 
occurs, and in other ways. But always and every- 
where it is offensive. If it occurs through thought- 
lessness, it is folly ; if consciously, it is hypocrisy. 
The bad taste of it is its least fault. As before 
men, it is clinking counterfeit coins, and pretend- 
ing to be rich. As unto God, what shall I say of 
it ? At the very best, it offers Him a hollow com- 
pliment, which is an insult. He taught his ancient 
people to confess and abhor it, even after many 
generations : '' Nevertheless they flattered him 
with their mouth, and they lied unto him with 
their tongues." Yet the land reeks with it. The 
smooth, satisfactory clauses of our private prayers, 
^' where not the heart is found," aj:'e cant. The 



OPERATION OF CERTAIN MORAL CAUSES. 81 

luscious words in which many a garrulous church- 
member disports himself (or herself), being only- 
words, are cant. The sentimental cant is bad 
enough ; but the cant about holiness is still worse. 
To have the believer's vital relation to God — the 
very stamp of God's fatherhood on his brow — 
mouthed upon and misrendered, travestied and 
cheapened, advertised and boasted of, is something 
so amazing, so humiliating, that it should be every 
Christian's lamentation and protest, until it is 
shamed out of sight. 

And we are not to shrink from saying these 
things because the infidel, with his talent- for 
hasty generalization, — it is the Austrian lip of the 
family, — is accusing all the devout of hypocrisy, 
and sneering at all their prayer and praise as cant. 
We must not be worried by a little crackling skir- 
mish-fire like that. It is our place, it is our point 
of honor, to go on with our inspection without 
regarding such an incident. We must call cant, 
cant, whoever repeats the word, and in whatever 
tone it may be repeated. And we must with calm 
determination make it our business to find out 
how much of our army is real fighting material, 
and how much is Chinese national guards, with 
gongs and fire-crackers for their weapons of war. 

It is certain that the present period, for reasons 
already given, is marked to a painful degree by 
the features of word-mongering, spurious religious 
fervor, and pious clap-trap. It is so because there 



82 THE light: is it waning? 

is so much genuine religious activity^ and so many 
new and taking methods of work and worship. 
The penumbra is child of the light. The evil- is 
real ; its growth is alarming : not, I repeat it, as 
threatening the existence and perpetuity of the 
Church of Christ, but as portending grievous falls 
for many true believers, and the stumbling of 
many sinners, who, when they fall, will not rise 
again. 



NATUBAL HISTOEY OF CHRISTIAN LABOB. 83 



CHAPTER IX. 

SUBJECT CONTINXJED. — NATUBAL HISTOBY OF 
CHBISTIAN LABOB. 

WE are to look now — and a rapid glance will 
suffice — at the effect upon any given com- 
munity of the transformations of Christian labor, 
from first efforts to routine. Those words them- 
selves, and their associated ideas, almost tell the 
story. 

Let us imagine a young man drawn, — despite 
all his previous habits of reserve, and that won- 
derful false shame under which Christ's disciples 
labor, — drawn by zeal for his Master, and by pity 
for souls, to address his first stammering words of 
warning and invitation to an impenitent friend. 
How his cheeks burn, and his heart beats ! his hand 
is cold, and his brain dizzy, with the excitement of 
a first attempt. Not that he regrets having made 
the effort, painful though it be : far from it. The 
spirit is willing, if the flesh is weak. He thanks 
God that he has spoken at last, has begun the 
dearest and noblest work imposed on man. He 
thanks Christ, who long ago began, and has never 



84 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAISTIKG? 

discontinued, loosing the sealed lips, as well as 
opening the sealed ear. 

Oh, sweet is the pain, and dear the burden, and 
precious the fears and longings, the hesitaJ:ions and 
brave impulses, of those first days ! They are 
the spring-days of a heavenly year, — the youth 
of an immortality. Nothing more sacred shall he 
feel, throughout his life on earth, than those first 
confidences with Christ in prayer, concerning their 
common interest and enterprise. 

The difficulties in the way of his beginning are 
immense. His utter inexperience alone is a 
mountain in his way. His sense of un-worth, his 
fear of seeming to set himself up as wise or (still 
worse) as good ; his uncertainty whether he is 
not about to do harm rather than good, and only 
bring ridicule upon himself and his cause ; his 
consciousness that there are so many in the Church 
far wiser and better and more fit for the work 
than he ; the doubt how to begin, and what to 
say, — clearly, nothing less than the whole force of 
the man can begin ! 

But he has begun, and persevered. What was 
a wonderful new sensation has become a normal 
part of his life. The sense of duty, and the sol- 
dier-spirit that are in him, keep up the work. 
Practice, meanwhile, is entirely removing the early 
difficulties, wliich made Christian work so severe 
a test of Christian heart. 

But then, this very disappearance of the diffi- 



NATUBAL HISTORY OF CHEISTIAK LABOR. 85 

culties makes the challenge to high motives and a 
deeply devoted allegiance less and less command- 
ing. The work, — in form, not, of course, in fact, — 
the mere rind and visible outside of the work, calls 
for less and still less of the man to take part in it. 
It will be just like poor human nature to let it run 
down to bare routine. 

Now, as man looketh on the outward appearance 
almost as much (and some men a good deal more) 
in their own case as in that of others, one may 
come by slow and insensible degrees to make a 
conscience of going through a round of appeals, 
and expending once sacred and precious words, 
and keeping one's own mind at rest thereby, when 
the fervor, the blood of the spiritual life, that once 
distilled into it, has all drained away. I say, it 
may do so. More : it is one of the features of the 
time, that it does so in large measure. Probably 
every reader of these lines who counts active 
Christian laborers among his acquaintances has 
had certain of them recalled to his mind while con- 
sidering tliis page. He misses out of their speech 
— however excellent their words may be — that 
indescribable vital quality that we call unction. 
That wistfulness of eye, that yearn in the voice, 
the very posture, that should tell how the spirit is 
stirred, — they were there, but now they are gone. 

God forbid that I should so sin against the truth 
as to make the impression, either that this is the 
general condition of things, or that there is any 



86 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

necessity for their taking this course ! As has been 
already expressly said, this is an age unparalleled 
in many centuries for the amount and the personal 
vitality of its work for Christ. It is as marvellous 
as delightful to behold the myriads who by the 
way and in the car or boat, in counting-houses, 
factories, shops, fields, where not? are bringing 
the question of salvation home to men's hearts. 
Probably a larger share of the harvest is now reaped 
by this wayside, unprofessional labor, than at any 
time since the apostolic and primitive ages. But 
the practical question here is. Does not routine 
affect a greater proportion of this work than it did 
five or even three years ago ? So far as such 
work runs on its momentum instead of renewed 
impulse, must it not grow lighter work, or gradu- 
ally cease ? 

And as regards the other wrong impression 
which these remarks might make : it is of vast 
importance to have it understood, not only that 
this shallowing and cheapening of Christian work 
is not unavoidable, but that, rightly used, work is 
itself a royal deepener and enricher of the heart. 
But the evil tendency is there, and must be con- 
sciously, intelligently, watchfully resisted, or the 
evil will ensue. 

But some will say, ^" This is almost pure theory : 
have you any facts to bear you out ? " If by facts 
are:. meant details, with names and dates, I cer- 
tainly have none to print. Nor can there be any 



NATURAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LABOR. 87 

necessity for proof of this sort, if it could be given, 
when every conscientious minister is praying to be 
saved from professionality^ and the most faithful 
laborers in every walk of life are seeking heavenly 
aid against the plague of their own heart ; when, 
anxiously considering the question, why efforts 
that of late accomplished so 'much are now accom- 
plishing so little, wise men are often driven to 
confess, it is because the life has exhaled out of 
the methods of our work. 

It is worth considering, at this point, that our 
Saviour's use of the word " hypocrite " indicates a 
much broader generalization than that use to which 
we now limit it. Nothing less is intended by it 
now than a charge of conscious fraud. Hypocrisy 
is simply the attempt to obtain the honor of piety 
or virtue under false pretences, in the current 
sense of the term. He who wears the guise of 
zeal and devoutness, who sings and prays, and 
confesses his sins with artificial unction, inviting 
society to take notice how pious he is, while he 
knows he cares for none of these things, — he is 
what we now call a hypocrite. 

The word in the Gospels, while it includes all 
that, includes a good deal more that is less gross 
and heinous. For the word hypocrite in classic 
Greek meant simply a play-actor, — one who acted 
a part on the stage. The ethical use of the word 
was something new when it appeared in the New 
Testament; a bold and even startling figure, to 



88 THE light: is it waning? 

describe and expose every sort of religious acting ; 
not merely that which was to deceive others, but 
also the still more subtle sort which is meant to 
deceive one's self. All going through one's part 
in the play, — even though there be no thought of 
deceiving men, but only the maintenance of deco- 
rous forms, and keeping up one's respectability 
thereby ; and then, the hope to keep right with 
society by our devoutness,. despite some certain 
little peccadilloes ; and then, gross and wilful 
shamming, — all these meet together, and fall 
under our. Saviour's indignant and sorrowful 
denunciation, when he cries, " Woe unto you, 
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " 

It will be a sufficient proof of this, if we look 
at his parable of the publican and the Pharisee a 
moment, though other proofs are. abundant. 

" The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with him- 
self : God, I thank thee that I am not as other men 
are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this 
publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of 
all that I possess." 

Not a trace is there in the whole story of his 
having said any thing untrue ; and it is incredible 
that Christ should not have noted the untruth if 
there were one, or should have added that the pub- 
lican went down justified rather than the Pharisee, 
if the Pharisee's statement of his duty-doing had 
been a lie. 

Am I asked, then, wherein lies the defect or 



NATURAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LABOR. .89 

the sin of his prayer ? It seems to be pointed out 
with profound wisdom, by the words, ''prayed 
thus with himself y The electric circuit was sim- 
ply from his lips to his lips, touched nothing but 
his lips. The Pharisee's transaction was ''with 
himself." No real thought of God as a present 
person, with whom in his infinite majesty he was 
then and there individually dealing, entered his 
heart. He went through the reputable form of 
temple-worship, and out of the abundance of his 
vanity his mouth spake. He was thus, in the 
Scripture sense, a "hypocrite." 

Led to reflect upon the matter by this word, 
thus used, we cannot but exclaim upon the amaz- 
ing amount of Hank cartridge fired off by would-be 
soldiers. Superficial work and superficial worship 
abound. Our "wells of living water" are filling 
up, choked with routine and formal observance. 
Many a well-meaning and, at bottom, honest 
worker, has come away from his Sunday-school 
class or prayer-meeting, — ay, or his pulpit, — 
with a heart sinking, and even fainting, under the 
question. Have I meant what I said? Have I 
been paying hollow compliments to the all-seeing 
God, or speaking honest truth ? 

And observe, his is not the worst case who puts 
snch questions to himself. He who flames along, 
or plods along, through his work in unquestioning 
self-content, — he is the more miserable man. And 
the land is growing full of them. 



90 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKIKG? 



CHAPTER X. 

SUBJECT CONTrNTJED. — SCEPTICISM LEAKING IN. 

EVERY age has its ailments. The complex 
life of civilization complicates disorders as 
well as resources. And Church history is as easi- 
ly divided into periods by the heresies, contro- 
versies, declensions, or other diseases that have 
prevailed therein, as by any other characteristic 
whatever. The characteristic of this period, as I 
have already had occasion to submit, is the luxuri- 
ant growth of knowledge, and of what passes for 
knowledge. 

There was a time when the resultant danger, 
as appears to me, was far other than it is now. 
Neither of the words in the title of this chapter 
would have applied then ; neither would " scepti- 
cism " have described the state, nor " leaking in " 
the process, which then threatened disaster to the 
religious world. 

When Geology, a flippant young hoyden then, 
talked as peremptorily of primary, secondary, plu- 
tonic, metamorphic, and aqueous rocks, as she 
speaks now in very different phrase ; when the 



SCEPTICISM LEAKING IN. 91 

insoluble unity of species, and the consequent 
dis-unity of the human race, was the shibboleth of 
Science ; when advantage was taken of old expo- 
sitions of Scripture, and the strong prejudice in 
their favor, to commit the Bible to untenable the- 
ories and dates ; when the brilliancy and amazing- 
ness of the discoveries, and the novelty of the 
positions taken, bewildered many a candid but 
timid mind; when these questions, just because 
they struck us on a new side, developed an 
awkward stiffness of joints, a rheumatic inflexi- 
bility in the Church generally, an inability to take 
in and amalgamate the new with the old, — the 
danger then was of more or less open apostasy ; 
avowed, consistent disbelief. Men who knew lit- 
tle or nothing of the strength of the Christian 
evidences, who would have been astonished if in- 
formed that Paley had only drawn out one branch 
of one argument for the Bible into proper propor- 
tions, instead of treating it all, — such men were 
very naturally thrown off their balance when con- 
fidently told that the deluge did not co.ver the 
whole earth, that the world was not made in six 
ordinary days, and that there were monuments in 
Egj^t twenty thousand years old. The mere 
audacity of the assertions would take such a man's 
breath away : it would seem impossible that any 
one should dare to say such things, unless fact 
compelled him to do it. And if they were true ! 
why, the very heavens would seem to roll back- 
ward at the supposition. 



92 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

We have learned better now. We know that 
other constraint than compulsion hy truth brings 
men to make audacious assertions, that the organ 
of destructiveness is portentously large on many 
heads, and that a passion for standing in the blaze 
of fireworks is the secret of many a loud explo- 
sion. And, on the other hand, we know the rooted 
strength of the gospel argument. We know that 
it is not the rolling of this or the other little 
bowlder against the foot of the mountain, that will 
crush it down. It is with a certain exultation 
that a trulj^ robust mind sums up the difficulties 
in the way of believing that the Bible is from 
God. 

*' True " — he will say — " that I know not the 
nature of inspiration, but only its results ; that I 
cannot put my finger on the divine warrant for 
precisely these sixty-six books and no other ; that 
the imperfect science of hermeneutics and the 
immature natural sciences have not yet completely 
harmonized their products ; that errors of tran- 
scription in certain details make the books conflict 
in certain minor regards; and that other such 
drawbacks from absolute demonstration can be 
found by those who look for them. What then ? 
The whole of natural theology points to the Bible ; 
the whole Bible rehearses, continues, and com- 
pletes that theology ; the whole evidence of his- 
tory establishes the truth of the ^ Gospels in their 
vital point, — the resurrection of Christ, — wliich 



SCEPTICISM LEAKING i:Nr. 93 

being established, the Bible and Christianity follow 
as a necessity ; the whole of my own being — that 
which I am by nature, and that which I am by 
grace — responds alike to its doctrines and to its 
facts ; and type, and prophecy, and things past, and 
things present, consent together in witness. What 
can summer breezes do against the Pyramid? " 

But it must be confessed that all minds are not 
robust enough to hold the truth in this simple, 
exulting constancy. And where there is not suf- 
ficient spiritual vitality to throw off the poison, — 
as perfect bodily health is said to expel some 
bodily poisons, — a pitiable effect is often produced. 
No wrong doctrine is received ; no right doctrine 
is rejected. But the whole life is weakened ; the 
spiritual vision is blurred ; a haze of uneertainty 
is thrown over those precious things which every 
believer ought so to hold as loyally to die upon 
them. 

The effect upon the soul is what the effect of a 
leak, not large enough to sink the ship, is upon 
the ship. It breeds foul gases in the hold ; it 
rots, whatever perishable articles are left within its 
reach; and, as the water gathers, it spoils the 
steering, and deadens the headway. 

With the popularization of the discoveries of 
science (for science itself cannot be popularized, 
but must grow more and more impracticable in 
that direction as its researches grow more ab- 
struse), in an age of declining vitality, this sad 



94 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

consequence of the wider knowledge of God's 
works must become more wide-spread. And in 
the course of time it must operate very seriously 
against the forth-putting of her full power by the 
Church. And that, again, means, declension and 
shame for many Christians ; ruin for many, many 
sinners. 

How plain it is, when one takes the courage to 
think it, that not the man of hypotheses and re- 
visable discoveries, but the man of revelation, has 
the right to speak dogmatically ! We know now 
what science will think about God when science 
is done learning. It is not our place to sit down 
at Mr. Tyndall's feet, and be taught concerning 
prayer, creation, or immortality. Even concern- 
ing heat, light, and molecular motion, it is just 
possible that he may live to correct his views, or 
to see them corrected ; but when he tries to topple 
over the temple, we need not be frightened — ex- 
cept for him. 

So it is, however, that ever and anon some phi- 
losopher and divine, who ought to know better, 
takes the apologetic tone, makes large concessions 
of what does not belong to him, — the truth, —^ 
and spends honors upon the enemies that enure of 
right to the friends of piety. And that apparent 
retreat weakens many a heart, and dims many a 
light, that should beat and burn for Christ. 

It is greatly to be deplored, that this evil, so 
subtle, so secret, so enfeebling the whole inner 



SCEPTICISM LEAKING IN. 95 

life, so inexpugnable by any logical method, has 
spread and is yet spreading so widely. It is like 
a foul smoke within the lantern of the light-house ; 
eddying round the lenses to tarnish them, and 
round the lamp itself to quench its rays. I have 
said nothing yet of remedies ; but, if they be not 
found for such dangers as these, our light will yet 
be but darkness. 



96 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 



CHAPTER XL 

ABUSES AND DISORDERS. 

ENSUING, more or less directly, from one or 
other of those generic evil tendencies of 
which I ha^^e spoken, come many which it might 
seem pedantry to classify closely, and of which 
by no means all will be named in this chapter. 
For, when the greater dangers and their appointed 
safeguards have been rehearsed, the less are prac- 
tically, even though not logically, included. My 
purpose, therefore, is rather to make certain prac- 
tical points than to exhaust the list of ills to 
which the Church of the present is heir. 

One of the chief — by no means new, but newly 
dangerous — is the divorce, in many minds and 
consciences, of morals and religion. 

The fundamental idea of religion, beyond all 
doubt, is obligation. And the fundamental idea 
of morals is precisely the same, — obligation. So 
far as they can be distinguished, their distinction 
lies in this : that the obligation of morals is to 
a princijjle^ while that of religion is to a Persoji^ 
even God. But this does not, and cannot, dis- 



ABUSES AND DISORDEES. 97 

criminate either the subjects of moral obligation, 
i.e., all moral beings, or the objects thereof, i.e., all 
duties. Religion takes up, under her imperial and 
benignant sway, all creatures to whom right and 
wrong are or can be known, and lays her heaven- 
ly sanctions on all they ought to do. She vastly 
enlarges the scope and dignifies the office of duty. 
She raises dead ethics to a life. She substitutes 
allegiance to man's true King, for the cold and 
ineifective impositions of abstract truth. 

There need be no larger reference to Scripture, 
in confirmation of this statement, than to adduce 
our Saviour's two great commandments, " on which 
han^ all the law and the prophets : " " Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and 
with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself." 
"Shalt" is the very keynote of morals. "The 
Lord thy God " is the sublime Person from whom 
the law must come, and to whom, in infinite de- 
gree, is moral service due. " Thy neighbor " is 
every brother subject who is brought within our 
reach. 

But, inasmuch as every human subject of God's 
glorious government is under doom by the law, 
it has pleased God to make his religion a salvatory 
scheme ; so to shape it that men may be recovered 
by it to goodness, safety, and eternal joy. Not 
one bond of duty is relaxed. Not one humiliation 
is laid upon the law. Duty is the more binding, 



98 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

because its motives are transfigured. The ques- 
tion of self-preservation is laid aside for the be- 
liever : his safety is assured in advance. And the 
law, which was once only a voice, — a Sinai-trum- 
pet voice, — is now Christ, with nail-scarred hands, 
and thorn-scarred brow, and rent side, saying no 
longer, "Do this, and live! " but, "Live, and do 
this ! " 1 

It is a part of the intrinsic and abominable 
meanness of sin, that it enters its wedge just here, 
There is an Antinomian unbelief — usually silent 
and secret — which assumes that this work of re- 
demption has filled the whole realm of religion and 
morals, and that he who " believes " (whatever that 
may mean in such a context) is discharged from 
any other service of his Creator and Saviour. In a 
form rather less gross, it proposes to balance moral 
shortcomings by religious observance ; to pay for 
a fault with a psalm, and rectify a dishonest ledger 
by a prayer, and gild a malignant temper with a 
sanctimonious look or a " holy tone " in the voice ; 
to keep a profit-and-loss account with God, and 
reimburse him for denial and treachery with a lit- 
tle extra piety. 

It is this which Thomas Hood set forth — it is 
hardly a caricature — in the well-known lines : — 

" Rogue that I am, I cheat, I lie, I steal; 
But who can say I am not pious ? " 

1 Dr. Chalmers. 



ABUSES AND DISORDERS. 99 

If I am reminded that this is no new thing, as 
even this quotation shows, I admit it, of course. 
But it must be. insisted, (a) that in a period of 
large declension the tendencies that way are in- 
creased ; (5) and that outward religious activity 
makes the self-deception easier ; (c) and that the 
failure of discipline in the churches leaves man 
more than ever at the mercy of his own deceitful 
heart. Just as many a soldier in the late war 
persuaded himself that djdng in the ranks would 
insure his salvation, many a man believes his sins 
against law, human and divine, will all be con- 
doned at the final account by his devotions. 

Thus, to all other relaxing influences upon 
men's integrity, this is added, — that men should 
feel they are not obliged to do just right toward 
man, if only they are " religious." 

Now, it is quite true that God has provided a 
way of escape for those who have sinned, laying 
their guilt upon his dear Son ; but he has done it 
precisely and expressly to save them from their 
sins. It is to make a holy world, he has inter- 
vened; not a foul pit, where corruption is per- 
fumed with incense, and gangrene is lacquered 
with pretence. 

Such appear to have been certain Assyrian 
tombs, where a thin gold mask is found to have 
been laid upon the face of the dead. Sennacherib 
would have taken no glory, reigning over such a 
realm. And shall God ? 



100 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANDTG? 

Another sore and perilous evil, apparently con- 
trasted with the last, yet not really foreign to it, 
is the intermingling and confusion of worldly and 
spiritual interests and practices, even to the secu- 
larizing of churches and worship. 

We have seen already that the world has bor- 
rowed, and learned to use, much of that phrase- 
ology which other years considered sacred, and 
which belongs of right to the children of God. It 
is an ill reprisal we make when we secularize holy 
things, — speaking in the speech of Ashdod, — 
bringing the ivory and peacocks and apes of Ophir 
into the Holy City. But where shall one begin 
the specifications involved in this charge ? 

There are sermons on literary, social, and politi- 
cal topics. There are sermons, professedly religious 
in subject, rendered absolutely irreligious by their 
tone, their jests, their stagey claptrap. 

There are church-fairs, and Sunday-school fairs, 
positively pervaded by the very spirit of the lot- 
tery, where all the traffic is in " chances." There 
are tea-parties, receptions, and theatrical entertain- 
ments given in the churches. There are "real- 
estate churches," and pious speculations, and ma- 
noeuvres and wire-pullings in ecclesiastical bodies. 
Against the operas constructed on sacred subjects, 
may be placed the churches where men laugh 
aloud, and applaud, as in theatres. 

And must we not place in the list of dangerous 
evils the hymns for general use that profess too 



ABUSES AND DISORDERS. 101 

much? particularly as sung in Sunday schools. 
If, indeed, we could single out the children whom 
the Lord has blessed, who tenderly love their Sav- 
iour, who simply and truly trust in him, and let 
them sing their joyful profession of faith and love, 
the good taste and wisdom of much of it might 
still be questioned, but at least there need be 
nothing hollow or insincere. But now the most 
emphatic, the most rapturous avowals of affection, 
confidence, and joy in Christ, are taught them en 
masse. They are taught to sing what is palpably 
untrue, and to plume themselves upon the doing 
it spiritedly and well. But what shall be said of 
the hymns that utter an intense, passionate long- 
ing to die and go to heaven ? Can any thing be 
more certain than that — except in the rarest in- 
stances — such desires (where they really exist in 
the minds of the children, or grown persons either, 
not broken by afflictions or years) are altogether 
morbid? or that to sing them without feeling 
them is (more or less guiltily) to make a false pro- 
fession ? 

The word of life continually guards us against 
"guile." It makes man confess, "The heart is 
deceitful above all things." It represents God as 
abhorring, almost above all other sins, the sin of 
false pretences. And it cannot be a light thing to 
embed in the child-heart, as his earliest, dearest 
style of worship, — as that which the Church incul- 
cates, and saints pray to have blessed, — the offer- 
ing God idle words. 



102 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

This suggestion is very reluctantly made. I 
hasten to acknowledge the exceeding difficulty of 
providing our Sunday schools with suitable and 
unobjectionable music. But it is absolutely neces- 
sary to point out that the very knot of the diffi- 
culty lies in this matter's having become a trade. 
Rival publishers crowd against each other with 
their books of sensational title and sentimental 
doggerel, the so-called " music " of each new one 
more utterly machine-made than the last. They 
wear out our words of passion : they rack meta- 
phor, that our children may sing twaddle. * 

This is one of the ways in which the varnish of 
sentiment is spread glistering over the most incon- 
gruous materials, the faults of the true surface and 
the defect of the actual substance cheaply hidden 
and hept unchanged. There is no more certain 
prescription for impoverishing our nature, and cut- 
ting ourselves off from supplies of grace, than 
thus — as the prophet Hosea has it — thus " feed- 
ing on wind." 

But I draw rein. One must stop short of say- 
ing all on so inexhaustible a theme ; and it may 
as well be at this point. We have seen reason 
enough why the light burns dim, — reason to some 
extent in the surroundings ; reason more and 
sadder far in the condition of the light-holder, 
the Church of the age. 

We come now, in the third part, to inquire for 
a remedy. 



PART III. 



WHERE SHALL WE SEEK A REMEDY? 105 



CHAPTER XII. 

WHERE SHALL WE SEEK A REMEDY? 

TO a very great degree, the religious aspect of 
our country resembles the agricultural aspect 
of any region where tillage has been shallow, 
wasteful, ignorant. In such a case the mere sur- 
face-soil is exhausted ; the earth beneath is baked 
almost as hard as stone ; the rains, unrestrained 
by the farmers' precautions, tear deep channels 
between the hills, and wash them away ; weeds 
flourish, while crops fail ; the wood-growth is not 
by any means the old forest restored, but a scanty, 
starveling, bastard substitute ; his land is the old 
farmer's reproach, and the young farmer's despair. 

If, now, one should treat the fields with a fertil- 
izer which stimulated the plant without really en- 
riching the soil, the result must manifestly be 
temporary improvement, and then a worse condi- 
tion than ever. 

And this is precisely what we have to guard 
against, in attempting to better the spiritual con- 
dition of the country. The clever, the vivacious, 
the not too accurate and conscientious, the impa- 



106 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

tiently zealous, are eager to rectify the world. 
Peter rushes in where Jk)hn almost fears to tread. 
We see the baneful effects of their interference, 
in the course and results of many religious revi- 
vals, or what pass for them. Surface-growth is 
stimulated; the rock beneath the surface is not 
crumbled ; the plants of grace are not fed and 
tilled ; and the second exhaustion is far, far worse 
than the first. 

Realizing these truths, the challenge of the 
prophets to Israel is just what we might expect. 
There, also, there had been a great declension. 
There also, had been many superficial movements 
of repentance. There, also, were there many to 
heal the hurt of the people slightly.. Morals were 
relaxed, sincerity declined, forms over-valued, the 
spirit of true worship forgotten and dispensed 
with. False prophets and unfaithful priests dis- 
honored the sanctuary, and misled the nation. 
Misery grew. The light of the nation's best life 
dimmed and darkened, and threatened to go out. 

What, now, in circumstances resembling, but in 
truth much worse than, our own, — what did 
Israel's inspired teachers prescribe ? 

In words as simple as profoundly significant, 
they command the nation thus : " Break up your 
fallow ground ! " ^ They knew — as a Wiser than 
they afterward said — that sowing among thorns 
would bring no fruit to perfection. And they 

1 Jer. iv. 3; Hos. x. 12, — the same words by two prophets. 



WHERE SHALL WE SEEK A REMEDY? 107 

knew that deep work is the remedy for woes and 
sins such as theirs. 

Deliverance from this present evil age and its 
especial perils is to be sought by praying and 
working for AN AGE OF strong oonyictioks. 
I select this word, conviction, because it is so com- 
prehensive, including, as it does, judgments of the 
mind, and principles of the heart. 

And these things, so easily separated in speech, 
are inseparable in any genuine spiritual life. It is 
only for the sake of sharply defined ideas that 
they are here, and for the moment, treated of 
apart. 

Strong intellectual convictions contain three 
elements: they are beliefs, positive, rooted, and 
practical. 

Most of the arguments which have been given 
to the world in behalf of the gospel were pre- 
pared and are shaped as answers to certain as- 
saults. They show us why we should not be 
moved from our hope by this and the other reason- 
ing, more or less subtle or gross, respectful or pro- 
fane ; but, when they have repelled the assault, 
they are done. They assume the truth of the 
Scriptures provided these particular blows can be 
parried. 

Now, that is a perfectly legitimate course to 
take. The assumption made is entirely fair, among 
those who already receive the Bible as prohahly true. 
But the impression made, in reading hundreds of 



108 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANIKG ? 

pages, all crowded with proofs that this, that, or 
the other assault does not overthrow Christianity, 
is apt to be one of dissatisfaction. We have been 
" marking time " instead of marching. Have we 
nothing to say, as of ourselves? Have we not 
truths to prove ? And is not that more fruitful 
work than exposing fallacies and confuting sophis- 
tries? And, indeed, after a long bout of purely 
negative debate, many a hearer or reader is left 
ready to ask, " What, then, do we actually believe ? 
What facts, what truths, do we hold as our own, 
which give to these strictures and controversies 
all their value? In the interest of the discus- 
sion, I have begun to lose sight of that truth, for 
whose sake we entered upon the discussion." ^ 

And how completely is the whole scene changed, 
when we lay down our own positions, and establish 
their strength by proofs ! It is not enough — it is 
almost nothing — that a man reject deism, and 
abhor atheism, and brush pantheism aside ; that 
he separates himself from Unitarians, Swedenbor- 
gians, or any other and all unsound bodies. Does 
he " know whom he believes " ? Does he know 
what he believes ? Is his scheme of religious 
truth clear to his own mind ? Can he lay his hand 
upon one after another of the positive affirmations 
of Scripture, and claim it as his own? Believing, 
and not disbelieving, are very different things. 

1 See this subject admirably treated in Isaac Taylor's Res- 
toration of Belief. 



WHERE SHALL WE SEEK A REMEDY? 109 

For reasons assigned, I am strongly convinced 
that there is a great deal of that sort of orthodoxy 
in the Church, which consists in not denying what 
the creed asserts. In an age of powerful religious 
conviction, that feature would almost disappear. 

But it is not enough that our belief be thus 
affirmative : it must be sure and steadfast, — a 
robust soul, grasping with cordial confidence what 
God has given it to believe. Rooted convictions^ 
well weighed, well warranted, unalterable knowl- 
edge of things good and true, — rooted convictions 
are a priceless treasure. They ask no caviller's 
leave to be; no glozing sophistry disturbs their 
intelligent assurance. They are the formulas by 
which we solve life's problems, the clews that 
extricate us from perplexities and entanglements, 
the indestructible riches which remain to us when 
all of which we can be despoiled has been taken 
away. 

One thing more is essential, — that our belief 
be no mere theory, but the solid substance of 
our life. Nothing less than this deserves to be 
called a conviction at all. How much a man finally 
believes as a basis for all his work, inclusive of 
that noblest work we call suffering, — so much and 
no more is he. 

And now we pass in a word from the merely 
intellectual convictions to those which are moral, 
when I add : They must centre upon a Person 
grand enough and good enough to bear the whole 



110 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKIKG? 

weight of man's devotion, even to martyrdom. 
This meets the craving of the immortal soul, — 
this, and this alone, — the soul which cries for 

" Something to feel before the heart grows hard; 

Something to think with which no doubting strives ; 
Something to love incarnate, which yet lives 
All undefiled by thought or touch or word." ^ 

Fix the mind on any name of one who has done 
a great thing, or struck an effective blow at a 
great abuse, or endured successfully the grind of 
the whole world's opposition, and you find him a 
man possessed of final convictions. From Palissy 
the potter to Francis Xavier, the rule is absolute. 
Precisely thus is it of the ages. The age that 
needs no monument, because its work is its monu- 
ment, is always the age whose convictions were 
monumental. 

I should need to ask pardon of my readers if 
I argued this point as though it needed to be 
proved. But there is often another reason for the 
argumentative statement of a truth, yiz., that the 
mind may be constrained to set it out apart from 
every other notion, and convert mere vague ac- 
quaintance with it into possession. 

1 Algernon Sydney Logan. 



BELIGIOUS CO]SrVICTIONS. Ill 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF OUR RELIGIOUS COi^- 
YICTIOKS. 

ERROR itself is the handmaid of Providence. 
It is set to render two great services to truth, 
both relevant to the matter in hand. One is to 
compel clear definitions, and test all offered proofs : 
this is the intellectual service. The other is to pro- 
voke our languid interest into a passionate love of 
that truth, whichever it may be, which error 
threatens : this is the moral service. 

And Christianity, as the highest form of truth, 
has always stood related in this way — indebted 
without thanks due — to its several antagonists. 
Pagan philosophy, infidelity, heresy. Persecution 
and controversy wrought her gristle into bone. 
Mistake, growing up into false doctrine, com- 
pelled deep and accurate thinking. And the 
sight, even the thought, of some great healing 
truth repelled, and seeming about to vanish again 
from the people who held it in too light esteem, 
has set the heart of the Pauls, the Augustines, the 
Calvins, Luthers, Wesleys, beating such throbs of 



112 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANIKG? 

love and grief, kindling such fires of zeal, as man 
will be the better of forever. 

Speaking of the reign of Alexander Severus, a 
Christian philosopher has said, " Everywhere — 
the exceptions are few — throughout the regions 
which the Mediterranean divides, in cities and in 
fields, we meet companies of men, even multi- 
tudes, who have quite thrown off the listlessness 
of scepticism, — men from whose countenances the 
suUenness of atheism has been dispelled, and who 
speak to us in the decisive tones that spring from 
an accepted and undoubted belief. Instead of 
those inarticulate babblings, as from the frivolous 
million, the ear catches now the intelligible utter- 
ances of men who say they have come into the 
possession of certainty and of hope. Multitudes 
of men, of all the races that were then subject to 
the Roman sway, and of some other races proba- 
bly, had passed from a condition of frivolous in- 
difference, or of sensual obtuseness, or of sullen 
hopelessness, and had come, rightfully or not, into 
the possession of a bright and well-defined reli- 
gious belief. The ' yea ' which Christianity has 
uttered takes a thorough hold of men's inmost 
souls as well as of their reason." ^ 

So far had their enemies brought them ; grace 
transmuting the mischief they would have done 
into a vast and blessed progression. 

That work has gone on still. We have now to 

1 Sentences taken from Restoration of Belief, pp. 44r46. 



RELIGIOIJS CONVICTIONS. 113 

renew the statement of Christian belief, the very- 
same belief now as then, but modified in state- 
ment by the progress of the campaign. It is the 
very same army : it has changed front a little, to 
face the enemy. 

Of these few great ideas which together are the 
pivot on which turns man's spiritual history, per- 
haps the last (as yet) to be perfected has been the 
idea of moral government, the government by 
authority. It is, of course, perfectly revealed as 
a fact, and in its elementary principles, in the Bible. 
It has been profoundly discoursed by sundry di- 
Yines. But it is to neither of these that I refer, 
rather to the real possession of it by the culti- 
vated mind of the day. 

Moral government by a Redeeivier: that 
is the subject-matter of that strong conviction of 
which I have spoken, whose uprising into the first 
place in men's hearts is to be to this needy age as 
life from the dead. A very few words will suffice, 
by way of explication. 

Moral government, pure and simple, is govern- 
ment by law; that law obeyed because of the 
authority of Him who gave it. That government 
as administered by God appears always to have 
contemplated probation, to end in justification, and 
establishment in righteousness and peace. Diso- 
bedience was naturally and necessarily fatal. 

Redemption is the arrest of the old processes, 
and the substitution of new ones for the very same 



114 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

object^ — gOYernment by authority and according 
to law. 

Salvation is not impunity. Justification is more 
than forgiveness, and, in fact, inseparable from 
regeneration. The subject of it is bound — but 
by new ties — to the old, perfect law of God, 
the law of love. That law, therefore, is not to be 
thought of as re-instated, as though it had fallen 
from its ancient seat of power, but magnified — 
glorified — by the new relation into which it is 
brought to man. Man's fall was an opportunity, 
and it was divinely used. 

The fierce clangor of the blast of Sinai was 
charmed and tempered and toned into the awful 
sweetness of a Saviour's voice.. If there be less 
severity in it, there is equal dignity ; and it hath 
now, as never before, a constraining power. Duty 
itself, like the regenerated soul, is translated out 
of the darkness of a condemning law, into the 
kingdom of God's dear Son. 

This is the point which we have been steadily 
approaching. That conviction, which, if deeply 
enough inwrought and earnestly enough believed, 
will prove the life-spring of the coming age, is a 
conviction of the double, — no, not double, for that 
implies partition, — the twofold work of Christ. 
Even that is not just right : I mean Christ in his 
twofold work. 

He who sees him only as a. sacrifice for sin sees 
in salvation only impunity. He who hears only the 



KELTGIOUS CONVICTIONS. 115 

wisdom of his gracious words sees in salvation 
only instruction. He who sees in him only a mar- 
tyr takes his crown clear away, and leaves the 
law all its terrors, and leaves a perishing world no 
arm to save. 

But he who discovers his opportunity in the 
offer of pardon ; who feels a thousand soft, strong, 
dear bonds binding him to his Master, because 
that Master is also his Redeemer ; to whom — for 
Christ's sake — " the word duty is become beauti- 
ful ; " whose knowledge of Christ by faith and by 
experience is solid enough to rank with his intui- 
tions; who returns the King's kind look with a 
deep devotion ; who, by dint of this personal and 
experimental knowledge, is affected with pity and 
not at all with alarm when men cavil or scoff ; in 
fine, he whose spiritual life is constantly enriched, 
and his heart dilated with larger and purer affec- 
tions all round, by commerce with this divine fact, 
— A Redeejnier administeetng a law, — he is a 
type of the manhood we stand in need of. He is 
a man of strong religious convictions, and his 
conviction regards the truth. 

It is not that he knows what other men are 
ignorant of. It is not that a saving application of 
the truth has been made to him alone. But he 
holds his knowledge by a different tenure, and 
with far other grasp, than other men ; and he is 
attaining to the greater salvation, — greater and 
loftier than pardon and peace, — a truly loyal 
soul. 



116 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 



CHAPTER XIV. 

HOW DOES THIS CONVICTION COMPOET ITSELF? 

nn HIS question supplies the crucial test of the 
-J- principles I have laid down. It asks, What 
will be the attitude, and what the work and life, of 
the man on whom this conviction lays hold ? and 
what would be the effect on a community, on 
the English-speaking race let us say, of its rise, 
like a set of the sea, on all their coasts ? And it 
proposes to measure the curative power of this 
offered remedy by the answers. 

If, now, we keep in our minds, that the object 
of this conviction is a Person, so that it is as much 
our right (by supposition) to speak of '*• him " as 
of '' it," the answer is easily outlined, however it 
may surpass human power to render it in full. 

It is one of the qualities of a strong conviction, 
strougly to assert itself as central. Just because 
it is fixed, all movable things which are any way 
attached to it will revolve about it. Because it 
cannot be shaken, or moulded, or cut and fitted, 
all more practicable things will conform to it. 

So, when He comes to be not merely thought 



TENDENCY OF THIS CONVICTION. 117 

of, or looked at, or weighed and considered, but 
possessed, — or, rather, to take possession, — loyalty 
to him becomes the pivot of the soul. This will 
not be the case while his outlines are dim to us, or 
our views concerning him are opinions, open to 
review and modification. It is when we know Him 
whom we have believed, — that is to say, when 
our mental relation toward him is that which we 
hold toward a fact and not a notion, — it is then 
that Jesus Christ takes on his proper stature, and 
towers in his proper kingliness over every other 
claimant of the soul. Other men may love, but 
this man's love will be devotion. Others may 
think, but he knows. Others may gravitate to 
obedience, but he is clamped to it. The sun that 
is always above his horizon, the light that cannot 
be put out, the object which triumphantly holds 
his vision and holds his heart, is Christ. 

Again, it is a constant tendency of a strong 
conviction to reduce the area and destroy the 
power of doubt. The very fact that one foot is 
on firm ground sets the other foot to feeling about 
for ground equally firm. Such a mind grows im- 
patient of fluttering, hovering, swinging to and 
fro. It settles what can be settled; eminently, it 
settles so much as can be made sure by a reference 
to this, which it loiows assuredly ; and it remits 
from view, as equally unsatisfactory and unim- 
portant, whatever cannot be relieved from doubt. 
What a cheerful courage rings out in Luther's 
favorite phrase, " This is certainly true ! " 



118 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

It is in vital contrast with that airy recklessness 
which tosses all its notions and conjectures gayly 
to and fro, not particularly concerned whether ay 
or no be the final verdict. Of all the states of 
man, there is hardly any one so pitiful, so meagre, 
so spiritless and idle, so shallow in every thing but 
its egotism, as the levity which utters alike its yea 
and its nay with an interrogation-mark; which 
hates no error, as it is devoted to no truth ; which 
is only amused when the most sacred things are 
drawn into question, or when the effort is made 
that they be henceforth out of question. 

Not so he who has grasped his Saviour-Master 
with the hand of deep conviction. He finds a 
thousand issues closed, now that that fact is sure. 
That God is a person, holy and true, and (most 
profound of wonders) a God of covenants^ — a 
notion absolutely unique, and as precious as 
unique ; that sin can be forgiven, but only through 
a plan of justification and vicarious atonement; 
that his Kedeemer is God-man ; that the Holy 
Spirit is a living being, who loves and hears, and 
keeps truth forever, — these, and truths like these, 
cluster about his fact, as planets about the sun, 
and are sure because they revolve around him. 
But you cannot deeply interest such a man in the 
" separate state " of the dead, or the typical char- 
acter of Samson, or the metaphysical account of 
inspiration, or any such subordinate and indeter- 
minable question. The contrast between the solid 



TENDENCY OF THIS CONVICTION. 119 

and the shadowy disenchants him of them all. It 
is the man who knows nothing finally and with all 
his mind, for whom there is a haze over all doc- 
trine alike, it is he who dallies with whatever 
takes his fancy at the moment, and is profoundly 
interested in none. 

It is naturally a sort of instinct with a strong 
conviction, to make its central truth a standard 
of value. It asks, on the presentation to the 
mind of any matter, ''How does it bear on this? 
Does it speak according to this word? If not, 
there is no light in it." 

One of Franklin's counsels to young men is. 
Settle a question by thorough examination, and 
then shelve it. It is of course conceivable, that so 
strong evidence might arise as to compel an honest 
man to take it down, and revise his judgment; 
but, until so compelled, weigh the shifting opinions 
of the day by these settled principles. One may 
apply here the words of Edmund Burke, though 
they were spoken in a somewhat different connec- 
tion : " I must beg leave to hint to you that we 
may suffer great detriment by being open to every 
talker. It is not to be imagined how much of ser- 
vice is lost from spirits full of activity and full of 
energy, who are pressing, who are rushing forward, 
to great and capital objects, when you oblige them 
to be continually looking back." 

The state of mental health and wholesome ener- 
gy is that m which all notions, importunate candi- 



120 THE LIGHT : IS IT WANING ? 

dates for our favor, are estimated in terms of our 
central truth. "What think ye of Christ?" is 
our measure for men. "How bear ye on Christ? " 
is our measure for notions and theories of every 
size and sort, our answer to temptations, our test 
of plans and proposals for his work or worship. 
Thus Paul glories in counting all things but 
dross, that he may win Christ. For him, " it is a 
small thing to be judged of man's judgment : he 
that judgeth me is the Lord." His battle-chant 
runs, "Laying aside every weight, and the sin 
which doth so easily beset ; looking unto Jesus." 
And his paean is, " I have fought the good fight, I 
have finished my course : henceforth there is laid 
up for me a crown which the Lord will give me at 
that day." 

It is involved in this, that a Christian's strong 
conviction becomes the guide of his life. What a 
heroic word is that of Paul's, " This one thing I 
do " .! That a life like his, so various and eventful, 
so busy and rich, so beset by enmities, addressed 
to so many interests, pursued through so many 
years, in distant lands, amid diverse people, can 
be condensed into a single formula, and expressed 
in the " doing of one thing," fills it with an inde- 
scribable grandeur. No purchasable convenience 
he ! no shuttlecock of fortune, or, worse still, of 
temper ! steadfast, faithful, loyal, valiant, the sim- 
plicity of his purpose is the sublimity of his life. 

Another happy effect of strong conviction is its 



TENDENCY OF THIS CONVICTION. , 121 

enriching and deepening of emotions, and its con- 
verting them into affections. 

In the genealogy of feeling, emotion stands 
parent of these two, — sentiment and affection. 
In the one, feeling is played upon by fancy, as we 
have seen : in the other, it grows into a principle. 
When an intellectual conviction passes over into 
the heart, and becomes a moral conviction (see 
Rom. X. 10 : '' with the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness " ) ; when it draws to itself the desires, 
tendernesses, hopes, longings, — in a word, the 
love that is in him, — then, clearly, his belief is a 
fountain of living water within him, a spring of 
action, — more, a spring of being. 

Sentiment is a summer shower, moistening the 
uppermost layer of the soul, refreshing verdure for 
an hour or two, strewing its transient jewelry upon 
the grass and the leaves. Affection is the brim- 
ming, over-running well, a perennial gift to the 
earth about it ; making the verdure which the other 
adorns, but seeking the roots of the palm-tree and 
the oak as well ; making the ground a garden, that 
would otherwise have been a desert ; making the 
life a joy, which but for it would have been a 
bondage. 

It draws its emotions now from that which it 
knows, namely, Jesus Christ, this Redeemer, who 
pays the homage of a death to the law. 

In no other light but this will this soul of 
strong belief look at any thing. Sin is " against 



122 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

Thee, thee only." Duty is serving the living God, 
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hell is his 
fixed displeasure. Heaven is his dear society. 
The law is his kind and righteous will. The 
crosses of life are his relics. The afflictions of life 
are his tenderest tokens of love. Prayer is com- 
muning with him. Believers are our brethren, be- 
cause they are his. Sinners are most of all to be 
pitied for this, that they will be denied his love 
forever. Doing good is laying a tribute, a poor 
little thing, but the best we have, at his dear 
wounded feet. 

Science tells us that the far-darting sun, shining 
steadily upon the earth as it spins around him, 
describes an endless spiral there, a vast magnetic 
coil; that this is his vitalizing power. Heat, 
electricity, and whatever other forces they involve 
or develop, spring into being, and play their 
fruitful parts, and uphold all life and beauty and 
strength and work in all the world, out of the sun, 
and by virtue of this relation. 

What a noble parable is here ! For this is noth- 
ing else but Christ, ''the light or sun of the 
world," holding his royal place, and pouring his 
rays upon and about the soul that makes him its 
centre, evoking its inmost life, waking its rich 
affections, setting the whole man to thrill and 
throb with blessed energies, — energies which sum 
themselves up in^this one word, " love." 

And now it cannot but be added that strength 



TENDENCY OF THIS CONVICTION. 123 

is thus brought to the whole nature, and not only 
to the affections. The rise of a great conviction 
in the heart is the six days of creation in one. It 
sheds light in the misty darkness; it separates 
opinion and knowledge, as the weltering waters 
from the firm dry land ; it puts the clouds in their 
place, and the strong hills in their place. Christ 
is the sun, and all other good, like the moon, bor- 
rows a little of his light; and the quickened 
nature teems with a thousand noble products, 
which adorn and enrich the man, and glorify his 
new Creator. 



124 THE light: is it waning? 



CHAPTER XV. 

subject continued. — HOW will this convic- 
tion COMPORT ITSELF IN A NATION? 

EXPOSITORS of the Book of Revelation are 
agreed, I believe, that the sea is the prophetic 
symbol of the people. And there is an admirable 
fitness in the figure. For the ocean is an absolute 
unit, one might almost say, without parts or mem- 
bers, no more to be divided than to be controlled 
by man ; an unit, yet utterly intractable by any 
power that man can apply, by any power that does 
not apply itself to the mass, like the lunar attrac- 
tion; an intractable unit, yet how mobile, how 
restless, how incessant ! Its swells heave, its bil- 
lows beat, its tides flow, in grand conformity with 
laws which we only partially understand. And all 
these are features of nation-life, as of the ocean. 

But now the operation of a great idea, revealed 
or only re-revealed to the con^dctions of a people, 
— that is like the flow of an oceanic current, 
which parts the more passive waters with a resist- 
less momentum; which holds on its steady way 
irrespective of the winds; which spreads as it 



THIS CONVICTION IN A NATION. 125 

flows, warms the air, tints the sea, displaces and 
sets in motion the masses on which it may have 
impinged, and, in its long circuit, works out the 
renovation of the whole element. 

It is the purpose of this chapter to suggest the 
results which would ensue if the belief of our 
countrymen in Christ were to become a living 
conviction. That he is widely and truly believed 
in; that he is largely and sincerely served; that 
every good thing owes nearly all its goodness, and 
every noble passion its best nobility, to the thought 
and love of Christ, — this it is my joy and my 
duty to maintain. But I am very sure no one 
will insist that the American Church, or any one 
of its several divisions, holds him in its heart or in 
its knowledge as it ought or as it might. * One 
feels as though there were some irreverence in the 
comparison ; and yet I see not how it can be wrong 
to say, simply by way of illustration, we surely 
might love him as the French army is said to have 
loved N'apoleon, or the French people to have loved 
military glory, or the Americans of 1776 to have 
loved independence and freedom. 

Suppose we did. Suppose he lived in our hearts, 
— the heart of the whole Christian mass, — as once 
in Paul's, — ay, or in the hearts of many sainted 
ones of later days : what then ? 

Why then, how small and futile would the 
whole bulk of infidelity appear ! The unity of 
certain knowledge would show itself as a unity 



126 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

of life. Mutual trust and honor would take the 
vacant place wherever jealousy and suspicion lately 
abode. Reverence, that has ebbed so low, would 
pour its melodious waters upon every shore. The 
Christian conscience now lies prone, confounded 
with public opinion : then it would rise and stand 
erect, and utter its imperial voice for God's law 
and glory, and men would hear, and sin would be 
ashamed. 

How the old battle-cry, ''For Christ's crown 
and covenant ! " would ring out ! not in enmity 
to man or men, only to their misery, pollution, and 
danger. And the mighty ranks would be full, 
and the trumpet of the gospel would search the 
blood with its sweetness. Every good word and 
work would prosper, — every one^ — if only a pro- 
found conviction of what the Lord Jesus Christ is, 
and has done and suffered, and now desires, could 
but possess the soul of his people. 

Then, what brotherly love would grow out of 
this divine love ! The hearts of all Christ's people 
"being knit together," as Paul prayed; loving, as 
Peter bids, " with a pure heart, fervently, '^ — what 
power there would be in prayer, what majesty in 
the calm strength of the Church, what fruits of 
labor, and what joy in those fruits ! 

Then learning would be sanctified ; and science, 
like the kings of Sheba and Seba, would offer 
princely gifts. Then should we waste no more 
power in collisions and denominational wrangles ; 



THIS CONVICTION IN A NATION. 127 

then would every man help his brother, and every 
man his neighbor, as in the building again of the 
walls of Jerusalem. How quickly would every 
fall of any Christian be retrieved, when all realized 
that righteousness and the law under the gospel 
regime are as truly honored by repentance as by 
punishment ! 

And then man's treasures would indeed be the 
Lord's. No more doling out, under pressure, of 
barely enough to protract the dying agony of a 
great cause. I protest it would be more merciful, 
totally to deny the call for money, and put the 
toiling, sorrowful officers of many great enterprises 
out of the pain of suspense and the sickness of 
hope deferred, than to toll them on from one 
disappointment and anxiety to another, by gifts 
neither large enough, nor of right spirit enough, 
to effect prosperity. A foreign mission slowly ex- 
piring : what a weight of woe and sin is revealed 
in those words ! A ligature is on the aorta, — the 
ligature of Christian selfishness. Each month 
tightens it ; each month dispenses less, and then 
less, and still less, of the indispensable means of 
living and working. The printing-press is para- 
lyzed. The colportor is dismissed. The worn-out 
missionary comes home to recruit his wasted forces, 
and is confidentially advised not to return. Ap- 
peals from the struggling mission-churches are 
answered with sad words, and the answers re- 
ceived with bitter tears or utter dismay. The 



128 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

poor, neglected light ! its oil all gone, it flickers 
a little in the horrible darkness of heathenism, 
and then goes out. 

And yet there is money in the land for pictures, 
statuary, bric-a-brac. A scrap of yellow paper, 
f with a great man's autograph upon it, is still worth 
scores or hundreds of dollars. There are tons of 
books given to already swollen libraries ; there are 
educational refinements and extravagances sup- 
ported by religious people, — all good things in 
their way : but there is bareness, miserable poverty, 
in the coffers of beneficence. 

Strong conviction, pervading the land, would 
array all these objects in their proper order, and 
pay tribute to them in their several degrees. 
Light for darkness, food for hunger, a helping 
hand for the fallen, the gospel for the ignorant 
and the pagan, — these would take their places 
among the necessaries of life, and a thousand 
pretty and pleasant things would return to their 
place among the luxuries. 

Then would God's word be glorified, and have 
its full and blessing sway. Human laws would be 
little more than the fringed hem upon the robe of 
law divine. The word of Christ revered, accepted, 
pondered, kept, would order the nation's life in 
peace and beauty. 

Not that the golden age would come in all at 
once, — that all people would at once be good, and 
all the miserable be made suddenly happy. The 



THIS CONVICTION IN A NATION. 129 

sun, arising upon a mist, does not dissipate it in- 
stantly ; neither will the best truth at once trans- 
figure man. But the virtue is in the sun, and the 
virtue is in the truth, infallibly to work their 
benignant effects. 



130 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 



CHAPTER XVI. 

IS THIS CONCLUSION PRACTICAL? 

ALL primary truths are theoretical. It is 
secondary truths, — truths of application, — 
that are strictly practical. But it is because they 
are secondaries of their respective primaries, that 
they can be practical. 

That which I have endeavored to set forth in 
these pages — that the remedy for our waning 
light is a living conviction, a living sense of 
Christ, not merely redeeming from punishment, 
but setting up God's law in our hearts, — is indeed 
a primary truth. It is the theory of personal and 
national life. 

But all action has its root in a theory, known or 
unknown; and all intelligent action has its root 
in a theory seized and applied. 

The first law of motion is pure theory. It 
never yet was seen in action, unmodified. And 
yet mechanics, astronomy, and how many other of 
the sciences and arts, have that grand law at their 
base, and would wilt like an. uprooted flower if it 
could be taken away ! 



IS THIS CONCLUSION PRACTICAL? 131 

The fallacy I have tried to strike is, that any 
thing this side of Christ secures good, or brings 
in a lasting blessing, except as we draw vital 
power into it from Christ. Not only all believers, 
but every good work and every heavenly bless- 
ing, is but a branch of the vine. " Severed from 
me," saith he to them all, "severed from me, ye 
can do nothing." Let them remain grafted in 
him, and every vessel is full of sap. Cut them 
loose from him, and they begin at once to wither 
and decay. 

If one were to look for the root, in man's mind 
and heart, of the great reformation, he would find 
it to be so much of this truth as is contained in 
the doctrine of justification by faith, — stated, 
however, and received, not in its abstract, but in 
its personal form. Christ, in whom God is a lov- 
ing and reclaiming Father ; Christ gathering into 
his own bosom the guilt of all our sins; Christ 
substituting our neglected or misperformed works 
by his perfect obedience ; Christ covering up the 
pitiful thing we are with his glorious righteous- 
ness, — clothing his bride in wrought gold (Ps. 
xlv. 13) ; Christ thus answering to divine justice 
for all its claims upon his people ; Christ as our 
representative holding his place and ours in the 
eternal glory, — this, wrought by the Spirit in 
the hearts of the nations, revived and has rebuilt 
the world. 

I surely need not tell again the story, — how it 



132 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

struck off the shackles of superstition ; created a 
soul beneath the ribs of infidel despair ; brushed 
away the mob of saints that had been thrust into 
the mediatorship, and set Christ only on that 
throne ; set the willing songs of praise, and the 
whispers of frank and confident prayer, a-flowing ; 
renewed the stamp of freedom and immortality, 
so nearly effaced from the soul of man. 

Neither can it be necessary to trace the benign 
results in other spheres, — how liberty of thought 
ensued, and the nobler uses of knowledge were 
conceived, and despotism began to sicken and pine, 
and the lights of home were brightened, and private 
purity and virtue seemed to grow possible. Then 
science was born, and philosophy was born again ; 
and charity put on new robes, and laid down the 
mask of pietism she had worn so long; and the 
swaddling bands of guilds were burst, and the seals 
of humanity's winter dissolved, and the streams 
ran, and the singing of the birds came back, and 
twelve frozen centuries found their spring. 

But I have long believed and felt, that while 
the truth I am about to name again was not 
denied in terms, or held back, or purposely dis- 
guised, yet it necessarily resufted from the nature 
of the times and the shape of the conflict in the 
sixteenth century, that it did not so impress itself 
on man, — so deeply, familiarly, practically, — as 
did the doctrine of free justification. That truth 
is : — 



IS THIS CONCLUSION PRACTICAL? 133 

CHRIST THE FRIEND OF LAW AND THE GIVER 
OF DUTY. 

Justification is the means to an end. The im- 
pression exists in millions of hearts that it is itself 
an end. Consequently, pardon and peace are con- 
stantly sought as the termination of the struggle to 
be a Christian^ and as bringing the effort-section 
of one's life to a close. 

Observe, no minister intentionally preaches that 
falsehood. It is preached, but casually, uncon- 
sciously, — preached much more by what is not 
said than by what is said, and still more by that 
tone and manner of putting things which holds 
out conversion and safety as the goal of the race.^ 

A most natural error on the part of any preacher 
whose chief anxiety is to rescue men from their 
horrible danger, and who specially appreciates 
Christ's glory in giving them bliss in the place of 
despair. But, oh, my friends ! salvation is obe- 
dience, salvation is holiness ; and there is no 
other. It is pitiful that men should set their 
hearts on mere safety, — should fail to realize how 
it is infinitely the greater blessing to be enabled 
and constrained to obey God than to live on in 
sin in ever so perfect an impunity. 

If the practical quality of this truth be inquired 

1 Many years ago an ignorant negro, on being baptized, was 
heard to mutter, " Thar! Now I gwine res'! " (" I'm going to 
rest.^') The work aU done! Ajid he is not a unique specimen 
by any means. 



134 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

of, therefore, the answer is, it underlies a thousand 
practical truths. 

Such, for example, as this: They that preach 
Christ must preach him as exalted to give not 
only remission of sins, but repentance. They 
must make it understood that repentance is not 
only, nor chiefly, sorrow for the past, but the be- 
ginning, and living, a new life, — even a life of 
steady, unflinching service. They must strike, as 
at a deadly heresy, at the notion that religion is 
escaping the curse of the law, and substitute for it 
religion, the loving and keeping of the law for 
Christ's sake. They must preach, more and more, 
the kingdom of heaven; for kingdom is govern- 
ment, and government is appointing, enforcing, 
and accepting — duty. 

While they proclaim as loudly and gladly as 
ever that Christ has put an end to the law's being 
used for justification, let them blow as strong a 
blast when they proclaim him taking up the law 
into himself, and claiming a perfect allegiance unto 
himself. "Ye call me Master and Lord; and ye 
say well; for so I am." 

In their pastoral labors, let them diligently put 
aside those debates about feelings^ of which the 
self-petting, self-pitying egotizers in the Church 
are so idly fond, and press work and duty on every 
conscience, — a spotless example, an uncompro- 
mising spirituality, a faithfulness, truth, and up- 
rightness in things small and great. " Happiness," 



IS THIS CONCLUSION PRACTICAL? 135 

it hath been both wittily and beautifully said (by 
Coleridge I think), — "happiness is like one's 
shadow: if we try to draw nearer to it, it flies 
from us ; but, if we go on our way, it will never 
leave us." 

But the warning cannot be too earnestly re- 
peated : If they preach mere duties^ they will fail. 
It is Chmst that must be preached ; only obedi- 
ence upon salvation must be preached, instead of 
the old heresy of salvation upon obedience, or the 
heresy of to-day, — salvation without reference to 
obedience, past, present, or to come. 

Is there not a brilliant array of authors, the 
most widely read and influential of authors, — at 
their head such names as Thackeray and Dickens, 
— who continually set up virtue as the rival of 
religion, and the nobler competitor of the two ? 
And is there any other such door to a refined 
deism as that ? 

And knowing, as we do most certainly know, 
that virtue owes its life among men to its inoscula- 
tion with religion, and draws its arterial supply 
thus at second-hand from the heart of Christ, what 
can be more practical than insistance upon man's 
serving him in all things, by whom he is to be 
completely saved? 

, Whence, else, shall every-day life draw its dig- 
nity, its worthiness to be the life of an immortal, 
and its joy, its fitness to light up the soul of an 
immortal, but from this doing all for Christ ? And 



136 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

how can we do all for Christ, unless he impresses 
himself upon the soul so deeply, and pervades it 
with so supreme a presence, as to be inseparably 
associated with all its interests, hopes, fears, deeds, 
— the least as much as the greatest ? 

Am I asked, How can this be done ? I answer. 
There is only one way, and that is doing it. Pray- 
ing, vowing, examining one's self, repenting and 
beginning again, watching, fighting one's inward 
foes, bearing the cross, receiving sorrows meekly, 
studying the word, in short, doing all things with 
this in view, and doing all by faith, — this is 
doing it. 



SUMMING UP. 137 



CHAPTER XVII. 

SUMMING UP. 

WE have only now rapidly to review the 
ground we have traversed, to make sure 
of its lessons, and my message will have been 
delivered. 

It appears that two things have happened, with 
reference to the waning of the light of Christ's 
Church in the world, — an apparent diminution of 
its brightness, of which its enemies have made too 
much; and a real diminution, of which we may 
easily make too little, — which is, in fact, of vast 
importance, because it involves the sin and the 
declension of the Lord's people, dishonoring his 
name, grieving his Spirit, provoking his displeas- 
ure, stumbling his feeble ones, and keeping the 
saving power of his gospel from the hearts of 
sinners. 

The facts on which this grave accusation is 
founded are such as these ; viz., — 

The general intelligence of Christians is slight, 
but vain ; poor, but counting itself rich, because it 
is rich in words and undigested information. They 



138 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

are a people of itcliing ears : they run to and fro 
among the notions and sophisms of the day, but 
knowledge is not thereby increased. 

Standard truths have lost much of their hold, 
either as tests of things new, or as settling the 
moral judgments of the community, and giving 
force to the public conscience. 

Reverence is decayed : the moral power of dis- 
cipline is almost entirely gone. 

The stream of Christian emotion is shallowing ; 
and, as it shallows, it loses its truer and nobler 
strain, and runs into sentiment and cant. 

Christian labor, while abounding as never be- 
fore, shows symptoms of running out to routine, 
losing its original spirit, and retaining the barren 
forms of once fruitful work. 

And, while thus 'the general vitality is weaken- 
ing, the effect of scientific infidelity is wide and 
large in tarnishing men's joys, multiplying their 
doubts, clogging their prayers, unsettling their 
confidence, planting thorns in their comfort, — 
breeding an uneasy, nervous debility, as by a 
malarious fog. 

So it comes about, that — as in other periods 
of religious declension — there is a large divorce of 
morals and religion; one part of the community 
trying to make up for their lack of honesty and 
moral worth by their windy piety, and another 
part flattering themselves that doing their duty to 
man will supersede the painful necessity of doing 
any thing for God. 



SUMMING UP. 139 

And again it follows, that, while some men are 
trying to pietize a worldly life, others are trying 
to make religion more attractive by more com- 
pletely secularizing it. And, as the sense of abso- 
lute truthfulness as a necessary of life is lost, our 
hymns, like our prayers, come to abound in false 
professions; till one's soul is sick, hearing little 
children clamorously avowing their passionate love 
of a God they hardly care for, and their longing 
for death which they ought to dread, their weari- 
ness of the life they ought to love, their yearning 
for a heaven which has no attractions for them. 
There are, of course, multitudes with whom these 
professions are true ; but they are made by the 
masses of unconverted children and very defec- 
tively sanctified Christians, with whom they are 
false. 

K these allegations are true, or if they in any 
considerable degree approximate truth, then it is 
certain that the vitality of the Church is declining, 
her vows are losing their sacredness, her doctrines 
are less loyally loved and defended, her work more 
slightly done, her sincerity alloyed, and her purity 
tarnished, by her own children. None can so wrong 
her but they. 

Now, as we are born again by God's word which 
liveth and abideth forever, as we are sanctified by 
his word which is truth, it is evident that the 
root of our disease is a weakened hold of vital truth ; 
and the remedy must be a recovery of strong con- 



140 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

victions to mind, heart, and life. And that which 
these convictions must regard is, just as clearly, 
that fact which makes the truth vital ; i.e., Christ 
in his place and work. 

And I have indicated reasons for believing that 
the special defect in our present convictions re- 
gards Christ's relations to law and duty, and that 
if, through the grace of the Spirit, he should be- 
come a living presence with his people in this 
regard, the age of power and glory would imme- 
diately be born. 

No abated gospel, no half-way proclamations 
of salvation and holiness, no learned or politic 
compromises with unbelief or disbelief, will serve 
our turn. Neither will the individual believer of 
the new age dally with doubts or duties. It will 
be his glory to venture all on the Lord he loves. 
They are found now, these brave ones, few but 
bright, dotting the dim ocean with points of light, 
like the northern seas. What we want is the 
broad splendor of an universal sense of Christ 
our King. 

" What is it that may, and that will^ hold its 
ground against the ever-increasing momentum of 
our modern philosophy ? It is that Christianity, 
whole and entire, which, filling as it did the mind 
and heart of the early Church, carried it so well 
through its day of trial." 

" Can any one persuade himself that this war 
[of church and heathendom] could have been 



SUMMING UP. 141 

waged on the strength of any of those abated 
notions of Christianity which we are now required 
to accept instead of itself ? We may be sure that 
it could not have been so, and we know it was not 
so. The faith of the martyr church was undoubt- 
ing in its quality, and ample in its compass." 

'' The religious convictions of many around us 
may have been loosened or impaired, yet not so 
injured as that the renovation of them would* not 
be joyfully welcomed, even as a man exults in the 
restoration of sight or hearing. Multitudes are 
there on all sides, to whom, although they have 
gone out of the way, a return . . . would involve 
no strange or incongruous revolution of mind, but 
only a repentant acquiescence in principles too 
long forgotten or misunderstood. . . . Churches are 
filled with those to whom the first wakening sounds 
of anothey Whitefield's voice would be hailed as 
bringing ' glad tidings of great joy.' " 

" But while, in this manner, a new proclamation 
of the gospel acts upon the multitude as a process 
of discrimination, it finds always a small number 
whom it beckons forward to follow gladly, rather 
than challenges to choose their part; and these 
are they who long have been looking for, and 
expecting, this visitation which now makes them^ 
glad." 

" No age has been so dark, no time so corrupt in 
doctrine or in manners, as not to have sent for- 
ward from earth a tide, albeit a slackened tide, of 



142 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

souls ransomed from the ills of earth; but at 
moments, and as with a sudden swell, it is as if 
the portals of paradise were thrown wide open, 
and as if the plains of that region were to be 
made glad with the arrival of hosts of spirits, safe 
housed." 

These sentences are culled from the writings of 
a Christian philosopher to whom this little work is 
greatly indebted, but not nearly so much as its 
author is, — the late Isaac Taylor. 

" Theeefore let all the house of Israel 
know assuredly that god hath made that 
SAME Jesus both Lord and Christ." 

The soul of saintly heroism is in those words. 
Is it not He that said, " Follow me " ? To be com- 
manded, to be possessed, by Christ Jesus, — that 
is victory and blessing here, blessing and glory 
hereafter. 



WHAT THEN? 143 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

WHAT THEN? 

THE power of his knowledge over what man 
does, and over what he is, being his final dis- 
tinction as a rational creature, the question at 
once arises, upon the conclusion of an argument 
such as we have been pursuing. What then? 
What rule of action and being results from the 
truth now established? 

Or state it thus : Since man as thinking, and 
man as willing, is the very same man, he must be 
bound to translate into terms of the heart those 
principles which he has demonstrated in terms of 
the intellect. In what word, then, shall we set 
forth the principle of action which we have been 
pondering as a conviction ? In what word shall 
this law of the believer's life become incarnate ? 

That word is Consecration. The correspond- 
ence is absolute between the living sense of Christy 
given us as our Lord and King, and the cordial and 
complete dedication of our whole manhood to him 
in " an enlightened obedience." ^ 

1 Bishop Butler. 



144 THE light: is it waning? 

Ah, " he is worthy for whom we should do this ! '' 
His divine wisdom saw, with perfect intuition, that 
the secret of man's moral ruin was that God's law 
had become something external to him. It pressed 
upon him, from the moment of his fall, from with- 
out. It overlaid his whole being with injunctions 
which he could no longer obey. The law could 
not retreat, because it was a right law. Man 
could not receive it, because he was fallen man. 
Such as the pressure of the air would be upon his 
body if there were no air within his frame ; such 
the crush of the law upon his soul if it were only 
imposed, and not inwrought. 

The law unalterable, and man depraved ! There 
lay the prof o under problem of salvation, — what we 
may call the vital, as distinguished from the judi- 
cial, problem. How shall man be so changed as 
that the immutable law shall become to him " the 
perfect law of liberty " ? 

Clearly, it must be by its re-introduction into 
him as a vital principle. Let me enlarge upon this 
a moment : there is nothing really abstruse in it. 

As I observe Nature, and her infinitely varied 
features, I find countless forces in action; all 
acting according to some determinable method, 
and acting by the same method upon all material 
bodies without regard to any thing special in their 
constitution. For example, I find the force which 
we call gravitation making no distinction at all, as 
to the quality of its action, between a thread of 



WHAT THEN? 145 

gossamer and a planet or a sun. The laws of 
motion, the laws of momentum, the laws of im- 
pact, — all such laws take effect indiscriminately ; 
and they may be said, accuratelj^ enough for my 
present purpose, to act from without^ upon their 
objects. These may be called mechanical laws. 

But, without reference to all those objects which 
are said to be alive, I find another set of facts 
co-existing with these. They have forces of their 
own, which we call vital forces ; and those forces 
have their regular modes of action, which we call 
laws of life, or vital laws. They together make 
the plant or animal what it is ; and, if they are not 
interfered with, we may know exactly what they 
will do. Leave them free^ and they will take such 
a form, or live out such a term, or attain this or 
that result. 

Just in front of me, as I write, grows a flowering 
vine. Obeying the laws of its life, it clings to or 
clambers upon such supports as are within its 
reach: it will wear its own distinctive tint of 
green, it will throw out its own particular sprays 
of bloom, or dispense its own peculiar fragrance 
upon the air. And likewise the thrush and the 
swallow, careering so triumphantly about, have 
their own interior principles of being, which are 
the laws of thrush-life and swallow-life, from which 
they will only depart under duress ; and, if the 
violence done those principles be in any degree 
radical, life itself is ended. 



146 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

But if, by a process of natural development, such 
as from the egg to the birdling, from the cater- 
pillar to the butterfly, new vital laws are intro- 
duced, — so that, e.g., that which carried its food 
within itself comes to nourish itself by food ob- 
tained from without; that which swam beneath 
the water disports itself in the air; that which 
crawled, now flies, — its liberty now is to live by 
the last code of vital laws. All else is bondage, 
disease, or death. 

As we rise in the scale of being, this distinction 
between laws mechanical and laws vital becomes 
the more signal and profound. Everywhere the 
law of life is a law impressed^ and not a la.w 
imposed. 

It is just here that some of the great apostle's 
most startling phrases find an easy and instructive 
explanation. At first blush, it seems almost in- 
credible that a loyal man should say of God's law 
that it "worketh wrath,". that the effect of salva- 
tion is that we become "dead to the law," that 
we are "delivered from" it, that "without the 
law, sin was dead; " where his example (the tenth 
commandment) shows that he has no reference 
here to the ceremonial law ; that " when the com- 
mandment came, sin revived," and he died; all 
this, though " the law is holy, and the command- 
ment holy and just and good." The effect of a 
holy and good law imposed upon a corrupt heart 
could only be to define and to exasperate its 
wickedness. 



WHAT THEN? 147 

Thus, again, we see that Paul had reference to 
the inner and' vital law — the actual and operative 
principle of life — in what follows, in that seventh 
chapter of his Epistle to the Romans : " I find, then, 
a law (not an imposed law, not a moral, but a vital 
law), that, when I would do good, evil is present 
with me." This it is which he calls the law of 
sin," yea, "the law of sin and death." And he 
exclaims exultingly that the spirit's law, viz., the 
law of life in Christ Jesus^ hath made him free 
from that ruinous, that fatal, law of sin.^ 

" He that believeth on the Son of God hath 
LIFE." What a pitiful evisceration, to make this 
mean only (or chiefly) "hath pardon" ! He that 
believeth is grafted in, and draws sap from, the 
royal stem. He that believeth is a member of 
Christ's body, yea, " of his flesh and of his bones." 
He that believeth can say, " I live : yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me." 

Neither is there any thing at all mystical about 
this, unless any one should hold it mystical to say 
that man has a moral and spiritual life. For, if 
one may say so much as that without mysticism, 
he may surely say that He who gave that life at 
first has now made it such, in some degree, as the 
Lord Jesus himself lives. 

Here, then, is the solution of our problem. We 
hear the voice of Christ, proclaiming, " I will be 
in them a law of life ; that which they hated to 

1 Rom. viii. 2. 



148 THE light: is it waning? 

do, they shall love ; that which was a weariness 
shall be a delight ; that to which thfey were dead 
shall witness their resurrection." 

Every life above the plants has its instincts, its 
passions, and its powers. And the higher beings, 
having the more complex life, have their several 
ranges or strata of these. And nothing deJSnes 
more accurately the moral status of any such 
being than the particular range of vital quallities 
which takes the precedence, and sways and subor- 
dinates the rest. I shall not waste a line upon 
the proof or illustration of truths so obvious and 
so familiar. 

But they lead us right into the heart of that 
whereof I am to speak, — the glory and the free- 
dom of consecration. 

He who has been born again has received from 
the Holy Spirit, in his regeneration, the first gift, 
the germinal point, of the Christ-life. It is to de- 
velop and grow from that beginning. And he is 
put in charge of the work ; not left to himself in 
the charge — God forbid ! what is man, to endure 
such a trust alone ? But he is put in charge^ and 
made fellow-worker with God in the growth and 
perfecting of a saint. And the work to be done 
is the completing of that germinal life, and the 
subjecting to it of all the rest of his being. It is 
in this last respect, pre-eminently, that the signifi- 
cance of the word " consecration " appears. 

Sin, with Christ in the shrine of the heart, is 



WHAT THEN? 149 

above all things a profanation. It bursts in the 
holy doors. It pours into the sacred place a foul 
and greedy throng. It transacts its folly and 
shame in the holy presence. It is not without 
meaning that the same word in the Greek (1 Cor. 
iii. 17) should signify " defile " and " destroy." 
That which is defiled as a temple is to the same 
extent destroyed as a shrine. To consecrate, there- 
fore, is to keep sacred, to reserve to a holy use. 
To consecrate one's self is to keep one's self sacred. 
And to keep one's self sacred involves the keep- 
ing down all in the soul which can rival the Christ- 
life, and keeping out all that would resist it. 

And when this life, which is love, — truth- 
wrought love, — has obtained possession, what 
freedom and joy are there ! Were ever words 
penned with a sweeter joy than these : " We love 
Him, because he first loved us"? The heart 
is cleansed of its old pollutions; but that is not 
all. The gangrened members rejoice in sound- 
ness and growing power ; but that is not all. But 
to love with Christ, to be moved with his emo- 
tions, to rest in the lowly and unclouded assur- 
ance of his favor, to bear pains, and take up bur- 
dens, and abhor sins, and love saints, and live in 
praise, and sleep in peace, and spread his knowl- 
edge and honor, and be swept along with his vic- 
tories, and see the starry heights and the unclosing 
gates of his glory, — this is life. 

But will any reader say, " Ah, that is all very 



150 THE LIGHT: IS IT WAKING? 

well for God's favored ones : they can climb to 
those joys, and attain to sucli spiritual strength 
and prosperity ; but we common Christians must be 
satisfied with low attainments and scanty joys, — 
we must just live along as well as we can, and 
not be ambitious to be saints." How pride does 
ape humility ! Too much self-satisfaction is at the 
bottom of all that. 

Now, I am not going to deny that God has his 
favored ones. Only a rose-water optimism ever 
tries to explain away the patent facts. There are 
ranks of being ; there are angels and archangels. 
There are diversities of gifts in every kind and of 
every degree. But why he favors, he has not 
deigned to explain. We should be glad to leave 
it with him. 

What concerns us at present, however, lies in a 
different direction. God's most worthy and glori- 
ous " favored one " is his Son Jesus Christ. It is 
in the covenant with Christ, that " he shall see of 
the travail of his soul, and be satisfied." Inas- 
much as he came to save his people from their sin, 
it is clear that he cannot be '' satisfied " while they 
are in bondage to sin. The fundamental question, 
just here, is not whether God loves you so lan- 
guidly as not to care how far you are from being a 
saint, — though that is a vast question too, with a 
very obvious answer to it, — but does God love his 
Son so languidly as not to care how much his peo- 
ple decline from him, slight his love, bring re- 



WHAT THEN? 151 

proach on his name, wound his heart, and tarnish 
his victory ? Is it not simply incredible that the 
reason of our continuing half-believers, dallying 
servants, skulking soldiers, should be in God ? 

It is greatly to be desired that all such weak 
and sinful speech should be banished from among 
believers, and that they who shrink from seeking 
a complete and thorough consecration should own 
that fact, to themselves at least. Acknowledge it : 
" I am too indolent, too worldly, too much afraid 
of my neighbors or my probable crosses if I 
went fully into his service. It might involve 
me in labors, sacrifices, and afflictions, beyond any 
thing I could consent to bear, if I undertook to 
be altogether Christ's." Shall I put your thought 
into still briefer phrase for you ? You are neither 
willing to belong to Christ entirely, nor to trust 
Christ entirely : that is the substance and the sum 
of it all. Will you go and tell your Lord that ? 

It is certain that a life of consecration will 
involve a great deal of self-denial, simply because 
there are so many " selfs " in every man that all 
cannot be indulged. Self-denial of some sort is 
inseparable from any life. Which "self^^ will you 
deny? that is the searching question. Will you 
check the spirit lusting against the flesh, or cru- 
cify the flesh lusting against the spirit ? 

To put one's noblest self in command, for 
Christ ; to sweep out of the soul its self-service 
and self-worship ; to be very jealous for the Lord 



152 THE light: is -it waking? 

of hosts, lest any treacherous thing within us rob 
him of his rights ; to see our Lord by faith, and 
live for him by love, and walk with him by grace ; 
to be moulded by his power, and steeped in his 
peace, and lifted into his light, and renewed in his 
image from day to day, — we call this consecration, 
but is it not heaven begun in the heart? 

And what would the Church be, and what 
would the earth be, if the spirit of our Saviour 
should thus fully possess us all ? 

"When I have this righteousness reigning in 
my heart, I descend from heaven as the rain mak- 
ing fruitful the earth ; that is to say, I come forth 
into another kingdom, and I ' do good works,' 
how and whensoever occasion is offered. If I be 
a minister of the word, I preach, I comfort the 
broken-hearted, I administer the sacraments. If I 
be an' householder, I govern my house and my 
family, I bring up my children in the knowledge 
and fear of God. If I be a magistrate, the charge 
that is given me from above I diligently execute. 
If I be a servant, I do my master's business faith- 
fully." ' 

That is to say, all duty and all work become 
sacred to us when this righteousness reigns in our 
hearts. 

Conceive it, if you can, believers; imagine a 
large and influential element in every honest and 
lawful vocation, pursuing their calling as some- 

1 Martin Luther's argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. 



WHAT" THEN? 153 

thing into which worship, and our epistle-ship for 
Christ, directly and continually enter. Imagine 
every artisan, merchant, artist, every lawyer, phy- 
sician, teacher, minister, breathing the spirit of 
Christ, serving the Lord consciously, with lowly 
joy and peace, as catching the glint of his smile, 
as swayed into the right way by his will, as guided 
by his eye, while a present friend and Saviour 
makes solitude impossible, makes sorrow sweet, 
and glory sure. 

As these disks of light multiply, and round out 
into fulness, and touch, or almost touch, each 
other, surely a sabbath sweetness would charm 
the air, as though softly sinking down from heaven. 
No more collisions of selfish interest; no more 
spirit of war in daily business; or, if remaining 
sin, and a devil not yet quite banished from the 
earth, should bring them in, they would have but 
trivial power against the set and ruling passion of 
God's consolidated people. They would test the 
virtue they could not corrupt. 

The control of that mighty engine, public opin- 
ion, would be recovered to the Church. Vice 
would be abashed. Violence would be charmed 
to peace. A thousand pleasures which a sinful 
world has contaminated, and from which we are 
therefore unjustly shut out, would be purified and 
restored. So far from the world's being made 
gloomy by the supremacy of religion, it would 
then, for the first time since Eden, be seen how 



154 THE light: is it waning? 

bright the earth can be. It is the conflict with 
the powers of sin ; it is being surrounded with 
temptations and dangers, — a complete and dread- 
ful system of them, — which compels the people of 
God to walk warily, and ''suspect some danger 
nigh, where they possess delight." 

Restrain our terrible neighbor, or — which comes 
to the same thing — enhance the power and se- 
cure the safety of Christ's flock ; let it be seen 
that the " kingdom of heaven " is indeed estab- 
lished, and the war of sixty centuries is entering 
on its last campaign, and a thousand restrictions 
and safeguards would be cut loose, and drift away, 
that now encumber as much as they protect. 

I am quite sure that none of us can fbalize 
the riches, power, and sweetness of human affec- 
tions, as they will be when righteousness reigns. 
We know well what man's passions are and can 
do : they have torn, channelled, flooded, weather- 
worn^ the whole world, as the lightnings and 
waters have scarred the earth. But love has 
never yet come into his kingdom. We get 
glimpses of what is possible, in the faces of some 
of Christ's saintly ones. There we see a tender 
steadfastness of heart, a loving kindliness so deep 
and mellow, so rich in sympathy, so warm and 
pure, shedding a peace so perfect and so strong, 
that we can compare it to nothing but a crystal 
river, risen into the air, lapsing soft music, and 
dispensing ethereal freshness on every hand. 



WHAT THEN? 155 

And what if all God's million sons and daugh- 
ters on earth were like this ? what if a cluster of 
such precious spirits were found in every village, 
and a group of such clusters in every town, and a 
constellation in every city, and scattered lights by 
the wayside, and in the forest, and over the prairies? 
what incense of a pure worship would flow to 
heaven, what rest in communing, what hallowing 
of earthly joys, what steeping of the sun and rain, 
yea, and the very soil, in the radiance of his real- 
ized presence, so that the very " trees of the wood 
should rejoice before the Lord ! " 

I cannot set forth even my poor thought of a 
land where God's people should indeed be one 
with Christ ; where absolute rightness of conduct, 
purity of thought, wholesomeness and wealth of 
feeling, should be the outcome of a holy liberty ; 
where men should dwell in mutual confidence and 
honor, bearing each other's burdens, and so fulfill- 
ing the law of Christ ; where the name that is 
above every name should be to every heart as 
ointment poured forth ; where the aroma of God's 
grace should be to the spiritual world what the 
breath of spring is to the physical world, — a sub- 
tle fragrance, betokening an infinite and blessed 
power, " renewing the face of the earth." 

For what portion of this grand result — which 
ought to have gladdened our weary eyes, long, 
long ago — is each Christian responsible ? For 
himself chiefly (though not indeed solely, as the 



156 THE LIGHT: IS IT WANING? 

very next clause will show), and for so much of 
the general effect as his influence and labors 
would cover. If he were right, he would make 
movement in the right direction by so much the 
easier, and movement in the wrong direction by 
so much the more difficult, to some of his for- 
lorn and shipwrecked brothers. Every candle 
dissipates at least a little darkness. Every light- 
house beckons, and shoots forth its warnings, to 
some home-bound vessel. 

Let the little child gather a tint of brightness 
at the Saviour's feet. Let a devoted heart shed 
its courage, shed its hope, upon the face of the 
young who are strong, and the older who are wise. 
And let the dear old saint, drawing nigh his rest, 
turn upon us who wait, one last look, lit up with 
the glory of immortal love and joy. When the 
Church is such as these words suggest, she will be 
as though one of God's constellations had stooped 
through the sky of night, and bathed the conti- 
nents in splendor. 

" Then shall the earth yield her increase, 
And God, even our own God, shall bless us : 
Grod shall bless us. 
And all the ends of the earth shall fear him.'* 



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